The Nasher Museum presented Richard Mosse’s The Enclave, an immersive 40-minute six-channel video installation shot in eastern Congo. The Enclave was the culmination of the artist’s recent body of work and was on view in the Southeast for the first time. Debuting at the 55^thVenice 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.

Central to Mosse’s work is the idea that the ubiquity of wartime images has desensitized us to the atrocities of war. 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 last 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 color 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 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.