somnolent deluxe

Vorticism was a radical art movement that shone briefly but brightly in the years before and during World War I. This exhibition celebrates the full electrifying force and vitality of this short-lived but pivotal modernist movement that was based in London but international in make-up and ambition.

The Vorticists forged a distinctive style combining machine-age forms and energetic imagery, embracing modernity and blasting away the staid legacy of the Edwardian past.

Focusing on the only two Vorticist exhibitions mounted during the lifetime, in London and New York, this striking exhibition brings together over 100 key works; including photography and literary ephemera, as well as seminal pieces by Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

This exhibition aims to shine a new light on this revolutionary group of artists, presenting the style, radical aesthetics and thoughts of one of the most truly avant-garde art movements in British history.

INFRA; examines the conflict in Eastern Congo using Kodak Aerochrome, a recently discontinued film that was originally developed for military reconnaissance. These extraordinary colors are not the result of Photoshop.

The project seeks a new strategy to represent Congo’s intangible conflict. Mosse chose to use this infrared aerial surveillance film out of context in order to explore how photography represents a place like Congo, a place deeply buried beneath its past cultural representations, from Heart of Darkness to Tin Tin.

Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, and so the work alludes metaphorically to the conflict’s lack of visibility in our global consciousness, as well as (paradoxically) this endless war’s over-saturation in the mass media.
Color infrared film portrays the world in a pink palette which the photographer uses to subvert the ways in which Congo and the African continent are traditionally photographed. He deliberately wishes to break the generic rules in order to question how we see (or don’t see) this war.