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Souda Camp, Chios Island, Greece photo by Richard Mosse

Documentary Video: Richard Mosse

Thu Mar 18, 2021 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Online

View the event recording and more on our Berkeley Arts + Design YouTube channel.


Featuring his work on human rights, refugee histories, and climate change, Mosse discusses the aesthetic vocabulary of video art and how it has helped him reframe documentary film and documentary photographic practice.

Richard Mosse is a contemporary Irish photographer. Using infrared film, he captures war-torn regions, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Registering the chlorophyll in plants, his Kodak Aerochrome film, transforms dense green foliage into fluorescent pinks and blues. The surreally tinted backdrop, seems a psychological barometer of violence and surveillance. “I wanted to export this technology to a harder situation, to up-end the generic conventions of calcified mass-media narratives and challenge the way we're allowed to represent this forgotten conflict,” the artist said. “I wanted to confront this military reconnaissance technology, to use it reflexively in order to question the ways in which war photography is constructed.” Born in 1980 in Kilkenny, Ireland, he studied at Goldsmiths in London, and received his MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art in 2008. In 2013, Mosse represented Ireland in the Venice Biennale with his immersive video The Enclave.The artist lives and works between New York, NY and Berlin, Germany. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.

Image Credit: Souda Camp, Chios Island, Greece; photo: Richard Mosse; 40 × 50 inches41 1/2 × 51 1/2 × 2 1/2 inches (framed), digital c-print, 2015