A photographic portrait of a problematic paradox

Claudio Hils's documentation of Northern Ireland's archives explores what is hidden as well as what is visible, writes Aidan Dunne

At first glance, it seems as if the work in photographer Claudio Hils's book and exhibition Archive Belfast almost wilfully declines to live up to its title. The term "archive" has distinct and inevitable connotations, and its use is likely to invite certain expectations: information collected, collated and made accessible. But Hils's documentation of archives relating to the conflict in Northern Ireland is an exceptionally oblique affair, a sustained observation of surfaces, details and surroundings, for the most part offering us no obvious way into the substance of the information.

Other photographic artists have taken what could be described as an archival approach to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Notable examples are Paul Seawright's influential Sectarian Murder Series, for which he revisited and photographed the sites where the bodies of sectarian murder victims were discovered: usually bleak, anomalous urban spaces. In a similar vein, David Farrell documented the sites where the bodies of people abducted and murdered by the Provisional IRA are thought to be buried. And there is of course Willie Doherty, several of whose works have an explicitly archival quality.

Venturing into this crowded terrain, Hils has been understandably wary, and built this wariness into his work. A photographer, writer and curator who teaches at third level in Austria, he does not claim any great insight into Northern Ireland, its history and its politics.

Rather he has, with considerable tact, set out to compile an archive of archives, encompassing various institutional records but also more informal archives held by political organisations, community groups and others. In one case he introduces the notion of a personal archive with a photograph of the interior of a private house.

What emerges from all this is a surprisingly effective portrait not so much of Belfast, in the obvious sense of the term, as of a city - and a society - in which the meanings of past and recent history are problematic. At its heart there is no consensual reading of that history, and even as it is being constituted its representation is being actively contested by antagonistic factions. It is, Hils seems to imply as well, a city and a society in which the dimension of the hidden is always more important than what is immediately visible.

In one of his photographs of the headquarters of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, vision is thwarted on two counts. Heavy steel plates line the windows and, in the foreground, a jumble of undisclosed objects are shrouded in a sheet. Like much else in Hils's images, all this is both straightforwardly explicable and metaphorically suggestive.

The storeroom of the RUC George Cross Historical Society houses a box of variously coloured wigs and hair-pieces used in undercover investigations: things are not as they seem. In another storeroom at the Linenhall Library, two closed wooden crates contain work from an exhibition relating to the Troubles and titled Troubled Images. Hils prompts us to reflect that representation is in itself a kind of packaging.

The idea of Northern Ireland as a place of deceptive surfaces has played a significant role in the work of other, indigenous artists, including Victor Sloan and David Crone. In Sloan's work the fabric of the image is often scratched and corroded, the seamless representation undermined by an obtrusive, recalcitrant past.

Hils may have in mind the anachronistic persistence of the past in his view of a model of a traditional Irish cottage, hand-crafted by a Republican prisoner, perched atop a microwave in a private kitchen, with, next to it, a mobile phone plugged into a charger.

And the final image in the book is of a blurred, scanned, digital copy of an old photograph in the Ballymacarrett Arts & Culture Society: the past imperfectly assimilated into the present or a fading memory?

Many of Crone's paintings visualise Belfast as a veritable hall of mirrors, a place in which it is impossible to find your bearings, where you are never sure what is real and what is a construction. There is an abiding implication in Willie Doherty's work that meaning itself is always ideologically constructed. The notion of an objective account is doomed from the start, memory is inherently false, it is fallible and in any case ideologically filtered. Hils sets out to provide a glimpse of history under construction by looking at the local settings in which memory is being selectively preserved and represented.

In his essay in the book, art historian John Taylor notes that our lives are documented and punctuated by clerks, the record takers. In the sequence of Hils's photographs, the Royal Victoria Hospital X-Ray Department makes recurrent appearances. We see thousands of records stored in the departmental archive. We see masses of boxed files that look as if they are overspilling their room and filling up the corridor - by no means the only occasion on which there is an intimation of excess, of the material overflowing the boundaries designed to contain it and becoming, paradoxically, a barrier rather than a record and a resource.

Elsewhere, a pillar supporting a shelf of bound volumes has buckled and fractured under the weight of the accumulated data.

The use of ubiquitous surveillance developed in parallel with the conflict in Northern Ireland, and Hils notes the banks of monitors, the rows of tapes, the network of cameras distributed throughout the city grid, and the steel cabinets stocked with the "Evidential video-tape archive". Chairs clutter the space between the cabinets and seem to make them inaccessible, perhaps because they are no longer current, are being transformed from evidence to artefacts. Just as the Crumlin Road Courthouse is empty and dilapidated, visibly crumbling away.

It is worth noting the dinginess, the shabbiness of the contexts in which history is, so to speak, made, a series of brutal, functional spaces.

In this regard, brief aspirational interludes are interesting: in the waiting room of the Royal Victoria's X-ray department, a light-box displays images of fish and crustaceans. In a stairwell of the Knocknagoney Station of the PSNI, prints by, presumably, police photographers, juxtapose an image of a bomb cratered city street with a view of a waterfall in a pastoral setting. These images within images are like glimpses of another reality altogether.

Archive Belfast is on view at Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall St, Belfast until June 4th. The accompanying book costs £24.95.