Montreal, Quebec, Canada, April 22, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Climate change is a well-present phenomenon and it affects the entire planet. Just in the last fifty years, within living memory, mass deforestation, carried out willfully by millions of people, has wiped out more than one-fifth of the original Amazon rainforest, the largest tropical rainforest in the world.
In 1975, only 1% of the original forest had been lost to human resource extraction. Today, we have lost almost 20%, leading to species extinction, affecting the world’s weather patterns and contributing to global warming.
[…] the film is both visceral and abstract, beautiful and horrifying. Broken Spectre is Mosse’s most powerful and consequential work yet.
Jonathan Griffin – The New York Times
About the installation
By combining a 74-minute video with a selection of large-format photos by the artist, Broken Spectre plunges the viewer into an unseen ecological catastrophe to reveal exponential environmental devastation in the Amazon Basin.
This dreamlike film installation shifts dramatically in scale and media to produce a visceral and emotional connection with the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the last great reservoir of biodiversity, being destroyed wholesale on multiple fronts to feed global markets and unsustainable corporate profit.
Acknowledgments
Broken Spectre is co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and by the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.
About
Richard Mosse
Richard Mosse (born Ireland, 1980) lives in New York. He earned an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, Barbican Art Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Recent survey exhibitions were held at Kunsthalle Bremen (2022) and MAST Foundation, Bologna (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Kunstmuseum (Basel); Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston); Akademie der Künste (Berlin); Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg); Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt); and Louisiana Museum (Humlebæk).
Broken Spectre was awarded the S+T+ARTS Grand Prize of the European Commission at Ars Electronica in 2023. Mosse was also awarded the Prix Pictet, 2017, the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, 2014, Yale Poynter Fellowship in Journalism 2014, the B3 Biennale Award, 2013,a Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011, and a Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing & Visual Arts. In 2013, he represented Ireland at the 55th Venice Biennale with The Enclave, an immersive six-channel video installation that utilized 16mm infrared film. Mosse will begin a one year residency at the American Academy in Rome in September 2024.
PHI
Founded and directed by Phoebe Greenberg and based in Montreal, Canada, PHI is a multidisciplinary organization positioned at the intersection of art, film, music, design and technology. Offering a panoramic perspective of radical ideas focused on collective experience, social impact, and audience interactivity, PHI is committed to future generations of art consumption.
PHI consists of the PHI Centre, PHI Studio, artist-in-residence programs, and PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. Through eclectic programming and a strong emphasis on content creation, PHI fosters unexpected encounters between artists and audiences.
- Broken Spectre by Richard Mosse