“I think I need to take six months off after this, I’m burnt out,” Richard Mosse tells me. For the past couple of years, he’s been constantly on the move. “I’d just like to stay in one place – I’m like one of those pinballs. I’d love to get a dog.” Mosse lives in New York but he’s at Berlin airport the first time we speak. We’re cut short as his plane is boarding and when we catch up again, a few days later, he’s at the Barbican in London, where his immersive, multi-screen video installation, Incoming, has just opened at the Curve gallery.
Rachel Segal Hamilton
Incoming will be shown together with Heat Maps, a series of stills from the same project, which have been nominated for the Prix Pictet. Like Infra and The Enclave (the unforgettable, hot pink-hued photographic images and film that saw him represent Ireland in the Venice Biennale in 2013, win the Deutsche Börse prize in 2014, and score a Magnum nomination in 2015), Mosse’s latest project again takes a rare technology – this time a heat-sensitive, military-grade camera – and applies it to a subject in a way that radically shakes up our visual vocabulary.
“We all have our fixed opinion about immigration,” Mosse says. “Some of us, the liberals, will want to welcome the refugees, will want there to be no borders. Others will say, my parents built this nation, my job’s been stolen by someone who will work for less, why can’t we regulate this?
“To create an artwork about that is very different to creating one about Congo. That comes across as a mythic conflict that doesn’t really touch us – even though we are implicit in it. The refugee crisis is really incendiary.”
Though serious when speaking about his work, there’s a lightness to Mosse’s manner which is immensely likeable. He’s self-effacing, warm and witty. Born in Ireland in 1980, he took a BA in English Literature and an MRes in Cultural Studies, before doing a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and later an MFA in Photography at Yale School of Art.
“I was always into photography but my parents are both artists and they told me not to go into art because there’s no stability in it and you turn into a raving lunatic. They’re probably right.”
How did you make the move into photography?
I left boarding school at 16 and went travelling on my own, around India and Nepal. It was great. I fell in love with travelling. I did my last two years of secondary school at Leighton Park, a very arty school in Reading. They had a darkroom so I spent all my time in there. I got the bug.
Because I didn’t initially study photography at university, I was able to develop other faculties. I read Shakespeare, I got a degree that pushed me intellectually.
