Art review: Richard Mosse, The Enclave

Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin

Richard Mosse’s installation The Enclave was a highlight of the 2013 Venice Biennale.

The Kilkenny-born artist has made it his mission to reinvent war photography, using a type of infra red film — Kodak Aerochrome — once used by the American military, and now discontinued. The film gives his images an otherworldly purple glow. Presented in a gallery context, they challenge the idea of ‘conflict fatigue’, the over-familiarity with traditional images of war that cause newspaper and magazine readers to simply turn the page.