Richard Mosse

A single work in the bustle of thousands captivated viewers at the Venice Biennale in 2013: the Irish Pavilion, which was the setting for the artist Richard Mosse’s frightening and uncomfortable video work The Enclave about the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. People entered the sea of images in the video projection room chatting casually and left it silenced and horrified. We see military conflicts and attacks on civilians played out daily in broadcasts, but in Mosse’s combination of artistic and documentary methods, the full effect becomes even worse. Mosse (born in 1980 in Ireland) uses a special military surveillance film that turns the countryside’s green colors to bright pink. With this blend of aesthetics and confrontation, Mosse succeeds in bringing the conflicts to life in a different light than the journalistic. One lowers one’s guard imperceptibly because it all takes place in an art museum, and one is therefore much more receptive and vulnerable when faced with the horrors.