Annual Report 2016 | Richard Mosse: The Enclave
Richard Mosse: The Enclave
Richard Mosse: The Enclave
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Richard Mosse: The Enclave
August 27, 2015 – January 10, 2016

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 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.

 

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.

The presentation of Richard Mosse: The Enclave at the Nasher Museum is made possible by Trent Carmichael, Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr, Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan, Caroline and Arthur Rogers, and Gail M.D. Belvett.


Nasher Museum exhibitions and programs are generously supported by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the late Mary D.B.T. Semans and James H. Semans, the late Frank E. Hanscom III, The Duke Endowment, the Nancy Hanks Endowment, the Courtney Shives Art Museum Fund, the James Hustead Semans Memorial Fund, the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family Fund, the Trent A. Carmichael Fund for Community Education, the Neely Family Fund, the E. T. Rollins, Jr., and Frances P. Rollins Fund for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the Marilyn M. Arthur Fund, the Sarah Schroth Fund, the George W. and Viola Mitchell Fearnside Endowment Fund, the Gibby and Michael B. Waitzkin Fund, the K. Brantley and Maxine E. Watson Endowment Fund, the Victor and Lenore Behar Endowment Fund, the Margaret Elizabeth Collett Fund, the Nasher Museum of Art General Endowment, the Friends of the Nasher Museum of Art, and the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, Duke University.

Learn more about artist Richard Mosse from the current issue of the journal Cultural Politics, published by Duke University Press and featuring a cover story The Enclave, on view now at the Nasher Museum.