Award-winning artist Richard Mosse will unveil a major new installation, presented by 180 Studios at 180 The Strand.
Filmed in remote parts of the Brazilian Amazon, the immersive video installation Broken Spectreis the result of three years of careful documentation of environmental crimes using a range of scientific imaging technologies. Seeking to overcome the inherent challenges of representing climate change in order to make visible the world’s most crucial yet ignored ecological warzone, Broken Spectre is Mosse’s most ambitious project to date.
Mosse has documented some of the most significant humanitarian and environmental crises of our time. He has mapped the journeys of refugees and their camps across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and documented an ongoing cycle of conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Combining reportage and contemporary art photography, he creates images of striking and unsettling beauty that push the boundaries of his craft to try and convey the scale and tragedy of events that are complex and opaque, often working critically with military-grade imaging technology and using camera, film, and sound in unconventional ways.
A selection of the artist’s photographs from the project will be displayed alongside the installation, including large-scale photographs that have not been exhibited in the UK before.
In 2017 Mosse was awarded the Prix Pictet for series Heat Maps, panoramas of refugee camps made using a military-grade thermographic camera, designed to detect body heat and classified as a weapon under international law. In 2013 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with The Enclave, an immersive six-channel video installation capturing war zones in Eastern Congo that utilised 16mm infrared film, shooting a discontinued military surveillance film developed to detect camouflage, producing a landscape that glowed a disquieting pink.
Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
12th October – 18th December 2022
Broken Spectre is presented by 180 Studios and co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation and by the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.
Broken Spectre was made in collaboration with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten and composer Ben Frost.
An artist’s book of Broken Spectre, published by Loose Joints, will accompany the exhibition, with essays by Txai Suruí, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Gabriel Bogossian, and Jon Lee Anderson.
