On view through February 15, 2015 at the Portland Art Museum is THE ENCLAVE (2013) - a video installation of six double-sided screens and series of still photographs by Richard Mosse. The work premiered at the 2013 Venice Biennale in the Irish Pavilion.
THE ENCLAVE was produced using a recently discontinued military film technology originally designed in World War II to reveal camouflaged installations hidden in the landscape. This film registers an invisible spectrum of infrared light, rendering the green landscape in vivid hues of lavender, crimson, and hot pink. On the threshold of the medium’s extinction, Mosse employed this film to document an ongoing conflict situation in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. This humanitarian disaster - in which 5.4 million people have died since 1998 - is largely overlooked by the mass media. Frequent massacres, human rights violations, and widespread sexual violence remain unaccounted for. In a kind of advocacy of seeing, THE ENCLAVE attempts to cast this forgotten tragedy in a new spectrum of light, to make this forgotten humanitarian disaster visible.
