Richard Mosse

Commissioned for the Irish representation at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, The Enclave is an immersive, six-screen video art installation by Irish contemporary artist Richard Mosse. Partly inspired by Joseph Conrad’s modernist literary masterpiece Heart of Darkness, the visceral and moving work was filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo using 16mm colour infra-red film, which captures otherwise invisible parts of the spectrum. The resulting imagery in Mosse’s work is hallucinatory and dream-like with the usual greens of jungle and forest replaced by shimmering violet. The Enclave depicts a complicated, strife-ridden place in a way that reflects its complexity, using a strategy of beauty and transfixion to combat the wider invisibility of a conflict that has claimed so many.

Irish artist Richard Mosse’s world-premiere moving image work, Broken Spectre, is a powerful response to the devastating and ongoing impact of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest. Filmed over three years in remote parts of the Amazon Rainforest, Broken Spectre is presented across an immersive 20-metre widescreen panorama, utilising different visually arresting strategies to depict the unfolding crisis; each shifting in scale and focus to convey these urgent environmental fault lines more powerfully.

Shot with an advanced new thermographic weapons and border imaging technology that can see beyond 30km, registering a heat signature of relative temperature difference. Classed as part of advanced weapons systems under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Mosse has been using this export controlled camera against its intended purpose, to create an artwork about the refugee crisis unfolding in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Libya, in Syria, the Sahara, the Persian Gulf, and other locations.

A work from 2023 comprising two interacting elements: footage shot on 35mm infrared film that documents protest speeches by Yanomami leaders who had fled for safety to aldeia Palimi-ú, a village in Northern Brazil, and multispectral photogrammetry captured by drone over extractivist fault lines and sites of environmental crimes. This film offers a heart-breaking glimpse into ground-level community-led resistance and solidarity, rallying against the industrial gaze of multinational and corporate profit. Ben Frost’s intense score is comprised of ultrasonic recordings of rainforest beetles, bats, and other lifeforms.

A performance of masculinity and élite-white-male rage, filmed inside the fraternity house of the Yale chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon.