Richard Mosse: The Enclave

Disturbing footage from conflict regions around the world appears on our screens with such regularity that it is often disregarded as simply more visual clutter. Mosse spent the several years photographing the war-ravaged land and people of Central Africa using a discontinued infrared film developed by the military to detect camouflaged targets. By registering an invisible spectrum of light, this film transforms the colour green into a brilliant pink, rendering the landscape in a surreal, psychedelic palette. Armed with his camera, Mosse and his collaborators, cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost, embedded themselves into armed Congolese rebel groups. The resulting work, The Enclave, is a magenta-suffused, seductive, morbid and deeply moving installation depicting stories from this troubled region.

Richard Mosse travelled in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo over four years (2010-14), following and living with paramilitary groups in a warzone riddled with ethnic conflict, massacres and systematic sexual violence. Even though the war has killed millions of people, it has received only scant attention in the international media. This invisibility is the starting point of Mosse´s work, which twists traditional photographic realism in developing a visual vocabulary to make the tragedy visible. 

Debuting at the 55thVenice Biennale in 2013, where Mosse represented Ireland, The Enclave is a beautiful and haunting look at a region of Africa that has been plagued by civil war, political instability and humanitarian crises for decades. Richard Mosse was born in 1980 in Ireland and is based in New York. He earned an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art in 2008 and a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Goldsmiths, London, in 2005. Mosse has exhibited at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; the Bass Museum of Art, Miami; the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris; the Dublin Contemporary Biennial and the Tate Modern, London. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The exhibition is made in collaboration with RIFF, Reykjavík International Film Festival..