The Irish artist Richard Mosse has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2014 announced this week at the Photographers Gallery. Mosse was nominated for the prize for his show, The Enclave, which was exhibited at Venice Biennale, Irish Pavilion.
The Enclave focuses on the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), documenting a haunting landscape, sites of human rights violation, and rebel enclaves, through six monumental double-sided screens ‘forcing’ the viewer to interact from an array of different viewpoints.
Spending more than three years in the DRC, Mosse embraces the type of discontinued surveillance film , once employed by the military, challenges documentary photography, and renders the Congo’s cancerous cycle of war, which caused death to over 5,4 million people. The resulting imagery registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, and disorienting pink psychedelic hues, and finds an alternative strategy to adequately communicate this complex and horrific war zone jungle.
Börse Photography Prize also published its ever first iBook, including works of all the 2014 shortlisted projects.
Man-Size, North Kivu, eastern Congo, 2011 Digital C print, 72 x 90 inches.
Courtesy of Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery
Madonna and Child, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012 Digital C print, 35 x 28 inches.
Courtesy of Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery
Safe From Harm, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012 Digital C print, 48 x 60 inches.
Courtesy of Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery
Safe From Harm, North Kivu, Eastern Congo, 2012 Digital C print, 48 x 60 inches.
Courtesy of Richard Mosse and Jack Shainman Gallery
by Xenia Founta