Artist of the Month: October with Richard Mosse

R. Mosse, Vintage Violence, 2011

CtC’s Artist of the Month for October is this year’s winner of the prestigious Deutsche Boerse Prize. Richard Mosse (b. 1980) is an Irish conceptual documentary photographer currently based in the US. His project, The Enclave, is the final result of his work in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

For its continuous wars, Congo is perceived in the western world as a place of darkness. By using an obsolete infrared film, once employed to reveal camouflaged stations, Mosse represents it instead as a surreal world of colours and light. At the same time though, his hallucinated view intends to underline the insufficiency of the photographic means in representing Congo’s disillusioned and overly troubled situation.

For the 55th Venice Biennale, in which Richard Mosse represented Ireland, The Enclave was turned into an immersive video installation shot on discontinued military surveillance film and accompanied by…