Roz Doherty

The Golden Age of Hijacking explores the myth of hijacking; fiction, and truth.

Between 1968 and 1972 air piracy was astonishingly commonplace in America, with over 130 planes being hijacked during this period. Happening as frequently as once a week, hijackers sought political asylum in Cuba or demanded money as a resolution to their often-desperate circumstances. Yet this remains a largely unknown and unremembered period of history.

The Vietnam war had proved to be massively unpopular, the idealism from the 1960s was a thing of the past, and public hysteria was being stoked by the mass media. All the while politics was seen to be failing to end the epidemic of hijacking, interwoven with this is the psychology of these disenchanted and desperate men who felt that their circumstances were such that the only solution was seen to be the hijack of a commercial plane. A way out.

Occupying a hybrid documentary space between image, information, and fiction, the work explores how we re-imagine events with limited visual clues to support the lyrical responses we create.