Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
180 Studios, London, England
Converge 45 Biennial, Portland, Oregon
Other International Venues to be Announced.
Production | Acquisition Grant
Broken Spectre is a multi-channel, immersive film and video installation that endeavors to bring the climate crisis into the visual, aural, and conceptual scope of human perception. Using highly specialized photographic technologies to document both the biodiversity and the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the project expands the limits of our perception with its extremely panoramic 5.1 aspect ratio, closeups of Amazonian flora and fauna captured in infrared light, and soundtrack of sonic frequencies typically well beyond the human hearing threshold. As in Mosse’s past projects, Broken Spectre transcends the failures of photojournalism and the traditional documentary form in favor of a new, conceptual documentary mode. The project sets out to confront our collective state of blindness toward impending environmental catastrophe: our choice of a “broken sublime” over scientific reason. Challenged with representing climate change itself, Mosse’s project presents an exciting investigation of scale and a poetic mediation on the failure of the power of the imagination to comprehend immense totality.
Broken Spectre is the third part in Mosse’s documentary trilogy concerned with perception, the visible, and the unseen. Broken Spectre will travel to multiple venues, starting in the summer of 2021 with USFCAM in Tampa, the Barbican Centre in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Southbank, and Le Lieu.
Image: From the series Tristes Tropiques © Richard Mosse. Images courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery and carlier | gebauer.
