jogroglog: June 2013

Friday 28 June 2013

East End art trip - from The Chisenhale to Pippy Houldsworth Gallery

Melting steps

Mariana Castillo Deball at the Chisenhale

Jack Lavender at the Approach

Matt Connor at Herald Street

B Wurtz at Kate Macgarry

Karin Ruggaber at Peer

The Dalston House by Leandro Erlich - a Barbican art project

Ruth Claxton at Pippy Houldsworth

Tuesday 25 June 2013

Venice Biennale - Best in show, Richard Mosse

If you see nothing else in Venice, make 40 mins to watch Richard Mosse's film , The Enclave, in the Irish Pavilion, near the Accademia Bridge.
Filmed on 16mm infrared film and embedded in rebel forces in the Congo - truly frightening, beautiful and surprising.

http://www.richardmosse.com/works/the-enclave/

http://vimeo.com/67115692

Throughout 2012, Richard Mosse and his collaborators Trevor Tweeten and Ben Frost travelled in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, infiltrating armed rebel groups in a war zone plagued by frequent ambushes, massacres and systematic sexual violence. The resulting installation, The Enclave, is the culmination of Mosse’s attempt to rethink war photography. It is a search for more adequate strategies to represent a forgotten African tragedy in which, according to the International Rescue Committee, at least 5.4 million people have died of war-related causes in eastern Congo since 1998.

A long-standing power vacuum in eastern Congo has resulted in a horrifying cycle of violence, a Hobbesian ‘state of war’, so brutal and complex that it resists communication, and goes unseen in the global consciousness. Mosse brings a discontinued military surveillance film to this situation, representing an intangible conflict with a medium that registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, and was originally designed for camouflage detection. The resulting imagery, shot on 16mm infrared film by cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, renders the jungle war zone in a disorienting psychedelic palette. Ben Frost’s ambient audio composition, comprised entirely of recordings gathered in the field in eastern DRC, hovers bleakly over the unfolding tragedy.

The Enclave immerses the viewer in a challenging and sinister world, exploring aesthetics in a situation of profound human suffering. At the heart of the project, as Mosse states, is an attempt 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.”