Installation view of Broken Spectre, Centre PHI, 2024.
Photo courtesy of Julien Grimard. ©Richard Mosse. Artwork courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
About
Broken Spectre is a monumental exhibition by artist Richard Mosse that focuses on the devastation of the Amazon rainforest by bringing together the seen and unseen to highlight the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate actions and decisions. Using unique photographic techniques, Mosse explores the ecological devastation too vast to comprehend, too minute to perceive, and too normalized to see.
At the center of the exhibition is Broken Spectre, a 74-minute film projected across a 70-foot span in the Main Galleries. Filmed from 2018 to 2022 in collaboration with cinematographer Trever Tweeten, it operates on multiple scales: fluorescent microscopic imagery captures the complexity of the Amazonian biome in scientific detail, while cinematic monochrome infrared scenes track illegal mining, logging, industrial agriculture, and Indigenous activism. The imagery is accompanied by a multi-channel sound field that mixes the audio of the Amazon with a foreboding musical composition by Ben Frost.
Accompanying the film is a series of large-scale photographic prints. Utilizing technologies such as multispectral aerial cameras, ultraviolet botanical studies, and heat-sensitive analog film, Mosse documents the human impact on the flora and fauna of the Amazon. These industrial and commercial technologies are the same tools used by the industries inflicting systematic environmental damage. In the artist’s hand, they bear witness to the impact of the unfolding catastrophe of global climate change at every scale.
Broken Spectre was co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, VIA Art Fund, the Westridge Foundation, and the Serpentine Galleries. Additional support was provided by Collection SVPL and Jack Shainman Gallery.
About the Artist
Richard Mosse (b. 1980, Ireland; based in New York) documents some of the most significant humanitarian and environmental crises of our time. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the 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). Mosse is the recipient of the 2025 Rome Prize in the visual arts, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Pictet 2017, the winner of the 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, and represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale with the six-screen video installation The Enclave in 2013.
Exhibition Support
Major sponsorship for Broken Spectre is generously provided by Paula and David Kraemer.