Richard Mosse is an Irish conceptual documentary photographer. He is best known for his photographs of the war in the Eastern Congo using color infrared film intended to create a new perspective on conflict. He was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and received a BA in English literature from King’s College London in 2001, an MRes in cultural studies from the London Consortium in 2003, a postgraduate diploma in fine art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2005 and a photography MFA from Yale School of Art in 2008. Mosse lives and works in New York and Berlin.1
Bio & Career
Mosse worked in Iran, Pakistan, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. His photography captures the beauty and tragedy in war and destruction. Mosse has shot abandoned plane wrecks in the furthest reaches of the planet and the former palaces of Uday and Saddam Hussein and now occupied by US military forces.
In 2013, Mosse represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale with the Enclave an immersive six-channel video installation that utilized 16mm infrared film. The piece is an attempt, as Mosse explains, to bring “two counter-worlds into collision: art’s potential to represent narratives so painful that they exist beyond language, and photography’s capacity to document specific tragedies and communicate them to the world.”
Mosse’s work is part of many public collections including the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, the Martin Margulies Collection, Miami, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. He published two books of his work and won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2014.2
Publications
Photography books by Richard Mosse
- 2018 The Castle, London: MACK, ISBN: 978-1-912339-18-1
- 2017 Incoming, London: MACK, ISBN 978-1-910164-77-8
- 2017 Richard Mosse, London: Barbican, ISBN 9780995708204
- 2014 A Supplement to The Enclave, Berlin: Broken Dimanche Press, ISBN: 978-3-943196-25-2
- 2013 The Enclave, New York: Aperture, ISBN 978-1-59711-263-5
- 2012 Infra, New York: Aperture, ISBN 978-1-59711-202-4
Awards and honours
- 2017 Winner of the Prix Pictet, Global Award in Photography and Sustainability, for Heat Maps series
- 2016 Co-commission by National Gallery of Victoria and the Barbican Art Gallery to create ‘Incoming’
- 2015 Culture Ireland Grant to bring The Enclave to the Democratic Republic of Congo
- 2014 Winner of the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize
- 2014 Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism
- 2013 B3 Award, Frankfurt Biennale
- 2012 European Cities of Advanced Sound Commission, ECAS Network
- 2012 International Artist Residency, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
- 2012 Visual Arts Bursary, Arts Council of Ireland
- 2011 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, with supplemental stipend from Leon Levy Foundation
- 2010 shortlisted for the AIB Art Prize
- 2009 Landscapes of Quarantine workshop at Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York, moderated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
- 2006-08 Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts, selected by Robert Storr and Tod Papageorge
- 2005 winner of the Perspective Award, selected by Ariella Azoulay and Terry Atkinson, Ormeau Baths Gallery
- 2005 International Artist Residency, Ramallah, Palestine
- 2004 AHRB Bursary, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
- 2019 Incoming, curated by Rudolf Frieling, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
- 2019 Incoming, curated by Peter Gyger, Le lieu unique, Nantes, France
- 2018 The Castle, MAC Museum, La Coruña, Spain
- 2018 The Castle, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha
- 2018 Incoming, curated by Yasufumi Nakamori, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA
- 2018 Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,curated by Richard Torchia, Arcadia University Art Gallery, Philadelphia, USA
- 2018 The Castle, Galería Leyendecker, Gran Tenerife, Spain
- 2017 Incoming, curated by Alona Pardo, The Curve, The Barbican, London
- 2017 The Castle, Galerie Carlier Gebauer, Berlin
- 2017 Heat Maps, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
- 2016 The Enclave, curated by Yean Fee Quay, Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland
- 2016 A Change of Place, curated by Jack Shainman, The School, Kinderhook, NY
- 2016 The Castle, Galería Leyendecker, Tenerife, Spain
- 2015 The Enclave, curated by Simon Maidment, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
- 2015 The Enclave, curated by Marshall Price, The Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
- 2015 The Enclave, curated by Marie Laurberg, Louisiana Museum of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 2014 The Enclave, curated by Brian Ferriso, Portland Art Museum, Portland, USA
- 2014 Fermata: Richard Mosse, curated by Shauta Marsh, The Indianopolis Museum of Contemporary Art, USA
- 2014 The Enclave, curated by Cheryl Sim, DHC-ART, Montreal, Canada
- 2014 The Enclave, curated by Joachim Naudts, FOMU Antwerp, Belgium
- 2014 The Devil You Know, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune, Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno, Gran Canaria, Spain
- 2014 The Enclave, The Vinyl Factory, collateral exhibition to the Deutsche Boerse Photo Prize, Photographers Gallery London
- 2014 The Enclave, curated by Claudia Kussel, FOAM Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 2014 The Enclave, curated by Felicity Fenner, University of New South Wales, Sydney
- 2014 The Enclave, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
- 2013 The Enclave, commissioned & curated by Anna O’Sullivan, National Pavilion of Ireland, 55th Venice Art Biennale; Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin; Ormston House, Limerick
- 2012 Infra, curated by Sheila Pratschke, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris
- 2012 Infra, curated by Christophe Tannert, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin
- 2012 Infra, curated by Peggy-Sue Amison, Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh
- 2012 Remains Of The Day, curated by Isolde Brielmaier, Dewberry Gallery, SCAD Atlanta; Moot Gallery, SCAD Hong Kong
- 2012 Infra, curated by Karen Newman, Open Eye Liverpool, UK
- 2012 Infra, curated by Xandra Eden, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA
- 2012 Infra, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray
- 2012 Infra, Galería Leyendecker, Tenerife, Spain
- 2011 Infra, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City, USA
- 2010 Whatever Was Splendid, curated by Aaron Schuman, Fotofest Biennial, Houston, USA
- 2009 The Fall, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City, USA
- 2009 The End of History, Eigse Arts Festival, Carlow, Ireland
- 2008 Airside, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York City, USA
- 2008 Trainers, Kilkenny Arts Festival, Ireland
- 2007 Nothing to Declare, Derby University, UK
- 2006 La Caja Blanca, Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Group exhibitions
- 2019 Migration, curated by Eve Respini, ICA Boston, USA
- 2018 No [Control], Hamburg Triennial of Photography, curated by Stephanie Bunk, Hamburg Kunsthalle, Germany
- 2018 RAY Photography Triennial, curated by Peter Gorschlüter, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany
- 2018 Challenging Terrain: Landscape Photography in the 21st Century, curated by Eric Paddock, Denver Art Museum, USA
- 2018 The World to Come: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Anthropocene, curated by Kerry Oliver-Smith, Harn Museum, Gainesville, Florida, USA
- 2018 Dark MOFO, curated by Olivier Varenne, MONA Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- 2018 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, curated by Bonnie Rubenstein, Toronto, Canada
- 2018 Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK
- 2017 NGV Triennial, curated by Simon Maidment, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
- 2017 Space, Prix Pictet Award, touring the V&A Museum, LUMA Westbau Kunsthaus Zürich, Hillside Forum Tokyo, Mouravieff-Apostol Moscow, The Gallery of Photography Dublin, and touring internationally
- 2017 DRESS Matters, Clothing as Metaphor, curated by Dr Julie Sasse, Tucson Art Museum, Tucson, USA
- 2016 Uncertain States. Künstlerische Strategien in Ausnahmezuständen, Akademie der Künste, Berlin
- 2016 Ravaged Sublime: Landscape Photography in the 21st Century, Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, USA
- 2016 Biennale de l’Image Possible, Les Chiroux, Centre culturel de Liege, Liege, Belgium
- 2016 Uncommon Likeness: Identity in Flux, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA
- 2016 Time as Landscape: Inquiries of Art and Science, Cornell Fine Arts Museum of Rollins College, Florida
- 2016 Art of the New Millennium in the Taguchi Art Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan
- 2016 Transfection of Violence, curated by Viola Romoli, MIT, Boston, USA
- 2016 The Shadow Never Lies, curated by Mark Nash, Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China
- 2016 Winter in America, The School, Kinderhook, New York, USA
- 2016 Dare You To Look: Radical Realizations in Portraiture, Burning in Water Art, New York, USA
- 2016 EIN BAUM IST EIN BAUM IST EIN BAUM…, Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf, Germany
- 2015 Salaam Kivu International Film Festival, curated by Petna Ndaliko, Goma, DR Congo
- 2015 Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art & Artifact, curated by Robert Rubin, Museum of the Moving Image, New York, USA
- 2015 Permanent War: The Age of Global Conflict, curated by Joanna Soltan, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- 2015 Tu Dois Changer Ta Vie: Exposition Renaissance, Lille3000, curated by Fabrice Bousteau, Tripostal, Lille, France
- 2015 American Soldier, curated by April Watson, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA
- 2015 Questa e guerra! Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo, Padua, Italy
- 2015 Fotografia Europea “Earth Effect”, Reggio Emilia
- 2015 Post Conflict, curated by Bradley McCallum, Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
- 2015 Aperture: Photographs, Aperture Foundation, New York, USA
- 2015 Land in Sicht, Weserburg Museum fur moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany
- 2015 Tech 4 Change: Artworks from the Statoil Art Programme, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Øvre Eiker, Norway
- 2015 Status Quo, The School, Kinderhook, New York, USA
- 2014 Musikprotokoll Festivali, curated by Fraenk Zimmer and Susanna Niedermeyer, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria
- 2014 Young Collections 02: Come and See – von Kelterborn Collection, Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen, Germany
- 2014 Second Sight: The David Kronn Collection, curated by Sean Kissane, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
- 2014 The Sensory War 1914-2014, curated by Tom Wilcox, Manchester Art Gallery and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
- 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, curated by Eva Eicker, Photographers Gallery, London, and Deutsche Boerse, Frankfurt
- 2014 Conflict: Art and War, curated by Midge Palley, Contemporary Art Society, London, UK
- 2014 On Return and What Remains, curated by Mark Feary, Artspace, Woolloomooloo, Sydney
- 2014 Contingency Plans, curated by Adam Bobette and Daan Roggeveen, University of Hong Kong, Shanghai Study Centre
- 2014 1+1=1: When Collections Collide, Montreal Museum of Fine Art
- 2014 Phantoms in the Dirt, curated by Karsten Lund, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, USA
- 2014 Fly Zone, Westbeth Gallery, New York, USA
- 2014 CounterIntelligence, curated by Charles Stankievech, Justina M Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, Canada
- 2014 Landscape, curated by Denis Viva, Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Italy
- 2013 Reality Based, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune, Leyendecker Gallery, Tenerife, Spain
- 2013 B3 Biennale des bewegten Bildes 2013, curated by Anita Beckers, Frankfurt Biennial, Germany
- 2013 Unstable Territory, curated by Walter Guadagnini & Franziska Nori, CCC Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy
- 2013 Unsound Festival, Riga, Latvia
- 2013 Unsound Festival, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Poland
- 2013 Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & the Francis Bacon Studio, curated by Christine Kennedy and Michael Dempsey, BOZAR Center for Fine Arts, Brussels, Belgium
- 2013 PPAC, curated by Sarah Stolfa, Philadelphia, USA
- 2012 UNNATURAL, with Boaz Aharonovitch, Aziz+Cucher, Ori Gersht, curated by Tami Katz Freiman, Bass Museum, Miami, USA
- 2012 Pigment: Color and Metaphor, curated by Edward Monovich and Stephanie Cardon, Brant Gallery, Massart, Boston, USA
- 2012 Things Beyond Our Control, with Rashid Johnson, Marilyn Minter, curated by Andrew Reed, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, USA
- 2012 Public: Collective Identity / Occupied Spaces, with Ai Weiwei, Donovan Wylie, Ariella Azoulay, curated by Bonnie Rubenstein, Scotiabank CONTACT Festival, Toronto, Canada
- 2012 Spectral Landscapes, with John Baldessari, curated by John Neff and Pamela Fraser, University of Chicago’s Gallery 400, USA
- 2012 Theatre of War, curated by Russell Rolen and High Concept Laboratories, Chopin Theatre, Chicago, USA
- 2012 Contested Territories, with An-My Lê, Paul Seawright, curated by Trevor Richardson, University of Massachusetts, USA
- 2012 Immortal Nature, with Nicolai Howalt, Hew Locke, curated by Gordon Cheung and Charlie Fellowes, Edel Assanti, London, UK
- 2012 The Second Seating, with Martin Kippenberger, William Powhida, Brian Duggan, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune, Leyendecker Gallery, Tenerife and ARCO, Spain
- 2012 Amid A Space Between: Irish Artists in America, curated by Monique Delaunay and Renée de Cossio, SFMOMA, San Francisco, USA
- 2011 Terrible Beauty: Art, Crisis, Change & The Office of Non-Compliance, curated by Christian Viveros-Faune and Jota Castro, Dublin Contemporary
- 2011 Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, LegalArt, Miami
- 2011 FotoWeekDC, Pulitzer Center, Washington DC
- 2011 Shutter, curated by Andrea J Avery, Union Art Gallery, University Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
- 2011 Topophilia, curated by Kayla Romberger and Alisha Wessler, Work Gallery, University of Michigan School of Art & Design, USA
- 2011 The Big Reveal, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, USA
- 2011 Hallmark Photographic Collection, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, USA
- 2011 The Long View, curated by Tanya Kiang and Trish Lambe, Dublin Gallery of Photography
- 2011 New York Photo Festival, curated by Elisabeth Biondi and Enrico Bossan
- 2011 Kakofonie 003, curated by John Holten, Block T, Smithfields Dublin and INFlux, Limerick, Ireland
- 2011 Kakofonie 003, curated by John Holten, Altes Finanzamt, Berlin and Aubervilliers, Paris, France
- 2011 Souvenirs from Earth, with Rodney Graham, Johan Grimonprez, Bill Viola, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
- 2011 Crossing Boundaries – Photo-Film-Photo, selected by William Ewing, Triennale der Photographie, Hamburg, Germany
- 2011 I want to go somewhere where the weather suits my clothes – a fall of light on fabric, curated by Finola Jones, mother’s tankstation, Dublin
- 2011 The Spectacle of War, The Empty Quarter Gallery, Dubai, UAE
- 2011 Tracing the Unseen Border, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud and Ian Cofre, La Mama La Galleria, NYC, USA
- 2011 With Hands and Feet, curated by Aoife Rosenmeyer, Torrance Art Museum, California, USA
- 2011 LOOK2, Charlottesville, USA
- 2010-11 reGeneration2 – Tomorrow’s Photographers Today, touring to venues internationally, including Aperture Foundation, NYC, and Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne
- 2010 B-Sides: A Dialogue With Contemporary US Photography, curated by Jennifer Ward, Fotofest Houston, USA
- 2010 ORT, curated by Martin Fengel and Elmar Bambach, Rathausgalerie, Kunsthalle Munich, Germany
- 2010 Leben Elementar, curated by Christophe Tannert, Fototriage Trier, Germany
- 2010 NY/Prague 6, selected by Katie Holten, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Futura Project, Prague, Czechia
- 2010 Landscapes of Quarantine, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, USA
- 2010 AIB Art Prize, Royal Dublin Society, Ireland
- 2010 Postcards from the Celtic Tiger, curated by Peggy Sue Amison, Xuhui Art Museum, Shanghai, China
- 2010 Semiramide, by Gioachino Rossini, Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp, Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen, Edinbugh Festival
- 2010 Guatephotofestival, curated by Adriana Teresa, Merida Museum of Modern Art, Guatemala
- 2010 Lost & Found, curated by Julia van Mourik, Theatrum Anatomicum, Amsterdam, Holland
- 2010 Para Bellum 12mm, curated by Marti Peran, Ca l’Arenas, Museu de Mataro, Barcelona, Spain
- 2010 Interrupted Landscapes, Champion Contemporary, Austin, USA
- 2009 Embedded Art, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin
- 2009 The Dialectics of Terror, curated by Joshua Simon, Chelsea Art Museum, New York, USA
- 2008 Media Matters, Friedrich Kittler and Technoculture, curated by Seth Kim-Cohen, Tate Modern, London, UK
- 2008 Yale Photography MFA 2008, Yale School of Art, New Haven, Danziger Projects, Gallery 339
- 2008 New Insight, Art Chicago, one of two students selected from the Yale School of Art MFA
- 2007 C NYC, Phillips de Pury, selected work from C International Photo Magazine 7-26 Sept 2007
- 2007 Documenta XII Magazine Project, part of Multitudes Journal, France
- 2006 Palestine Film Festival, Barbican Centre, London
- 2005 Bloomberg New Contemporaries, touring Barbican Art Gallery, Cornerhouse Manchester, Bristol
- 2005 Perspective, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Winner of the Perspective prize, selected by Terry Atkinson and Ariella Azoulay, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Projects
- In conversation (2017)
- Incoming (2017)
Incoming charts mass migration and human displacement unfolding across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. War, persecution, climate change, and other factors have contributed to the largest migration of people since WWII. Incoming intercepts two of the busiest and most perilous routes. One from the east, from countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, crossing Turkey, and arriving in the EU on the shores of Aegean islands, then passing through the Balkan corridor on the route north. The other is from the south, from countries in the Sahel region – Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea – crossing the Sahara Desert for Libya, where they attempt to cross the Mediterranean hoping to reach Italy, often continuing north for countries such as France, Germany, the UK, and other wealthy nations.
- Heat Map (2017)
Reading heat as both metaphor and index, this project is an attempt to reveal the harsh struggle for survival lived daily by millions of refugees and migrants, seen but overlooked, and ignored by many. By attaching a thermographic camera to a robotic motion-controlled tripod, Mosse has scanned significant sites in the European refugee crisis from a high eye-level, creating densely detailed panoramic thermal images. Each artwork has been painstakingly constructed from a grid of almost a thousand smaller frames, each with its own vanishing point. Seamlessly blended into a single expansive thermal panorama, these images evoke certain kinds of classical painting, such as those by Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch, in the way that they describe space and detail. They show the perimeter fences, security gates, loudspeakers, food queues, tents, and temporary shelters of camp architecture, as well as isolated disembodied traces of human and animal motion and other artifacts that disrupt each precarious composition and reveal its construction. Very large in scale, Heat Maps reveal how large groups of refugees are dealt with by our governments, and the conditions in which they are forced to live in the margins and gutters of our societies.
- Grid (Moria) (2017)
Grid (Moria) is a sixteen panel flatscreen installation, a study of Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos: its architecture, anthropology, and details of the squalid conditions within the camp’s security walls & barbed wire. This work was begun in early 2016 and completed a year later in early 2017, after the camp had been burned twice in protest by refugees interned within. The camp is a flashpoint in the European refugee crisis, a place where many have died in massively inadequate conditions that resemble a concentration camp. Populated by about 5,000 refugees fleeing war, persecution, climate change, & food and water shortages in countries from Afghanistan to Eritrea, Pakistan to Mali, Syria and Iraq. Current conditions are dire and several have died of hypothermia since the start of the year. Refugees living here have lost hope, as they cannot leave the island and are in a state of indefinite limbo. This piece was made using a robotic, motion control tripod system, and edited rather like a musical round — each screen is playing back the same piece of footage at different intervals.
- The Enclave (2013)
The Enclave premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale in the Irish Pavilion. The Enclave was produced using a recently discontinued military film technology originally designed in World War II to reveal camouflaged installations hidden in the landscape. This film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. On the threshold of the medium’s extinction, Mosse employed this film to document an ongoing conflict situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. This humanitarian disaster—in which 5.4 million people have died since 1998—is largely overlooked by the mass media. Frequent massacres, human rights violations, and widespread sexual violence remain unaccounted for. In a kind of advocacy of seeing, The Enclave attempts to cast this forgotten tragedy in a new spectrum of light, to make this forgotten humanitarian disaster visible.
- Infra (2011)
The Infra series is marked by Mosse’s use of Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued reconnaissance infrared film. The film registers chlorophyll in live vegetation. The result is the lush Congolese rainforest rendered into a beautifully surreal landscape of pinks and reds.
- Come Out (2011)
Over the course of the last seven years, Irish photographer Richard Mosse has photographed postwar ruins in the former Yugoslavia, cities devastated by earthquake in Iran, Pakistan, and Haiti, the occupied palaces of Saddam Hussein, airport emergency training simulators, the rusting wreckage of remote air disasters, nomadic rebels in the Congolese jungle, and more. Reading through his catalog of subject matter, one could easily assume that Mosse is an inveterate photojournalist in the most traditional sense, chasing hard facts in order to illustrate breaking news. Yet through his work—generally photographed in large format and presented large scale, with a penchant for the staggering, the allusive, the historical, and the Sublime—Mosse is revealed as a practitioner intent on challenging the orthodoxies of documentary photography, in particular the contexts, imperatives, and “responsibilities” that are often both assumed by and imposed upon the documentary genre, and indeed upon the photographic medium as a whole.3
- Quick (2010)
- Breach (2009)
- Theatre of War (2009)
- Untitled (Iraq) (2009)
- Gaza Pastoral (2009)
- The Fall (2009)
After fifty summers, the wrecked aircraft’s ultra-modern form becomes a part of the primeval landscape. Its shattered carapace lies scorched by the sun and scoured by extreme winters. Redolent of science fiction, these Futurist antiques have been partially cannibalized, their unwanted buckled shell listing in the mountain gales. American and Japanese automobiles lie scattered in the dangerous wastes of central Iraq. Ephemeral relics, shot to a skein of rusting metal, tremble delicately in the abrasive dust storm. Like Saddam Hussein’s shattered hilltop palace, these are the follies of globalized forgetting.The Fall is a photographic survey of our historic unconscious. Mosse travelled to intensely remote locations, from the Patagonian Andes to the Yukon Territories, and worked as an embed with the US military to produce work for this exhibition. The Fall is a rescue mission to try to locate our blasted sense of landscape and archeology, and reclaim the primeval waste for our imagination. Produced to an epic scale, each of the photographs in The Fall is a history painting for our times.
- Airside (2008)
A plane crash, like any disaster, is a moment of contingency and confusion. Large aircraft are reduced to virtually nothing in a matter of seconds. The disaster itself cannot be seen beneath a thick cloud of black smoke, leaving no trace other than the visceral scent of aviation fuel, burnt foliage, and death. The hyper-functional, pared down forms in Mosse’s photographs speak of mass anxiety, routine submission to terrible fear, as well as our desire to see, to experience an air disaster. Charred and phallic, these are monuments built to our own fear. They are built not to assuage our fear, but to make it concrete, to articulate our worst nightmares, so that we may ritualize our helplessness.
- Fraternity (2007)
- Nada Que Declarar (2007)
- Jew On A Ball (2006)
- Dust (2005)
- Kosovo/Kosova (2004)
Works
External links & References
- Ficpatrik, Milja. “Richard Mosse”. Widewalls, 2014. https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/richard-mosse/.
- Ficpatrik, Milja. “Richard Mosse”. Widewalls, 2014. https://www.widewalls.ch/artist/richard-mosse/.
- Interview By Aaron Schuman, Aperture Magazine, Issue 203, Summer 2011