Since the end of the 1990s, a civil war has been raging in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It has so far claimed the lives of more than five million people. Over a period of two years, Irish filmmaker and photographer Richard Mosse and cameraman Trevor Tweeten travelled through the region. The result was the film installation The Enclave, which captures horrifying impressions of the nightmare of war on 16mm infrared film. This is not the documentary perspective of a war reporter, however: instead, it is a personal and artistic encounter with the atrocities.
Kunsthaus Graz, Space04, Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz
Opening: 27.09.2014, 12:30 Uhr.
Installation / duration: 27.09. – 12.10.2014
Info: +43-316/8017-9200.
For The Enclave, Richard Mosse used a recently discontinued film technology originally designed for the military. Kodak Aerochrome was developed during the Second World War with the aim of detecting camouflaged positions on the ground. It works by revealing the infrared light spectrum that is usually invisible to the human eye. This conflict is being fought on the green landscape of extraordinary beauty on the shores of Lake Kivu, which Aerochrome film translates into vivid hues of lavender, crimson and pink. This humanitarian disaster has been largely ignored by the media. The massacres and human rights violations, and also the ubiquitous sexual violence, remain almost unknown to the outside world. The Enclave makes these events audible and visible: six large double-sided screens placed within complete darkness in Space04 allow the viewer’s physical immersion into the scenes. Unlike the cinema, the installation forces the viewer to interact from different vantage points. The raw brutality of war is work was selected to represent Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The Graz presentation of The Enclave is the film’s Austrian premiere. portrayed, both on the part of the rival militias and from the perspective of the civilian population at risk. The haunting sounds were composed by Ben Frost from recordings gathered in the provinces of North and South Kivu. In an interview with John Kelly for Irish broadcaster RTE, Richard Mosse says: ‘I believe that beauty is the sharpest tool in the tool box and if you can seduce the viewer and make them feel aesthetic pleasure regarding a landscape in which human rights violations happen all the time, then you can put them into a very problematic place for themselves, they feel ethically compromised and they feel angry with themselves and with the photographer for making them feel that way. That moment of self-awareness is a very powerful thing, because the viewer is constructing their own opinions, and taking their own ethical position. It forces the viewer to meditate on how imagery from conflicts is constructed in the first place.’” In 2012 Richard Mosse and Ben Frost were given a commission by ECAS (European Cities of Advanced Sound), which allowed them to make The Enclave. The work was selected to represent Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. The Graz presentation of The Enclave is the film’s Austrian premiere.
The Enclave
Director & producer: Richard Mosse (IR)
Editing: Trevor Tweeten (US)
Sounddesign: Ben Frost (AU)
Duration: 39:25 min
6-channel-video-installation, 16-mm-IR-film, digital., 6-channel-audio
2012–2013
A production with ORF musikprotokoll & Kunsthaus Graz in cooperation with steirischer herbst. Within the framework of ECAS – Networking Tomorrow’s Art For An Unknown Future, winner project of ECAS Call 2012, working period 2 „Bridging“.
Richard Mosse
Richard Mosse’s 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. His most recent series, Infra, captures the ongoing war between rebel factions and the Congolese national army in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mosse was born in 1980 in Ireland and is based in New York. He earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008 and a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London in 2005. Mosse has exhibited work 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.