Ben Rivers

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

Inspired by the themes of Knut Hamsun’s ‘Pan’, Ben Rivers ventures deep into the remote forests of Aberdeenshire to document the routine of Jake Williams - a man seen in all seasons, living reclusively, surviving frugally, and passing the time with strange projects.

The third in the series of experimental "horror" features, this collection features the shorts The Psychotic Odyssey of Richard Chase (1999) by Cary Burtt, J.X. Williams' Satan Claus (1975), Jason Bognacki's Loma Lynda: The Red Door (2008), Terror! (2007) by Ben Rivers, Mike Kuchar's Born of the Wind (1961), and a collaboration from Guy Maddin and Marie Losier called Manuelle Labor (2007). While not featured in the program, an extra includes the short It Gets Worse (2008) by Clifton Childree.

Charting the beginnings of the time, through the descent of man, on to an uncertain future - all shot throughout the seasons in the garden of S, who lives in the wilderness and builds contraptions.

A family's place in the wilderness, outside of time; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at an idea of freedom, which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format, but is undercut with a sense of foreboding. There's no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived, rituals performed.

"La Montagne Invisible" is an installation conceived as a journey into the infinite : an immersive multi-channel AV installation that transforms the material of a Finnish wanderer's secular pilgrimage towards a utopian summit into an infinite video labyrinth of beginnings, endings and disjunctive in-betweens.

For Dreaming the Dark: hands that see, eyes that touch, Ana Vaz invited artists and filmmakers whose work trust cinema’s capacity to transform relationships between the body and the camera to propose works that will engage with both perception and embodiment. Could cinema be an art of embodiment? By what rituals and actions could vision become tactile?

A mystery that began as a document of abandoned farms in South East England.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

The march of time claims another casualty. Sack Barrow documents (and laments) the out-dated, but functioning, technology of a family-owned electroplating factory in the weeks around its closure — its old ways now unsustainable in the modern world.

A collaboration between filmmaker Ben Rivers and sculptor Céline Condorelli, with contributions by writer and artist Jay Bernard, After Work blurs boundaries between labour and leisure using nimble essayistic encounters that are as suggestive as they are concrete.

A fragmented road trip through Britain on the peripheries. Down empty roads, off in the wilderness, a few lone stragglers.

A film by Ben Rivers

A film by Ben Rivers

A film by Ben Rivers

A hand-processed portrait of Jake Williams – who lives alone within miles of forest in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Jake always has many jobs on at any one time, rarely throws anything away, is an expert mandolin player, and has compost heaps going back many years. He has a different sense of time to most people in the 21st Century, which is explicitly expressed in his idea for creating hedges by putting up bird feeders.

A person is heard fleeing an angry mob – yet the uncannily empty streets show no sign of the chase. A never-ending nightmare. Sound reveals the hidden history in an imagined place.

Three mythical stories from the Republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean, concerning the origin of humans, why pigs walk on all fours, and why a volcano sits where it does.

Inspired by Richard Jefferies’ late 19th-century ‘After London’ - one of the earliest post-apocalyptic novels - the film serves as test footage for how a future London might look. How a city that no longer exists might appear, having disappeared. Instead, in its place a vast toxic swamp, spewing ocherous smoke and chemical waste, with electric blue sulphurous flames emerging from the dead land. Shot on location in and amongst the craters and sulphur mines of the Ijen volcano complex in Indonesia, the imagery is accompanied by a recording of Herbert Read reciting his poem ‘The Autumn of the World’.

Inspired by the themes of Knut Hamsun’s ‘Pan’, Ben Rivers ventures deep into the remote forests of Aberdeenshire to document the routine of Jake Williams - a man seen in all seasons, living reclusively, surviving frugally, and passing the time with strange projects.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

In an impressionistic rush that combines patina-marked images of shoes made by hand with the attributes of a genre film, Rivers returns to a favorite topic: objects as the bearers of their history. Shots of the cobbler at work highlight the handcrafting process, yet entirely without indicating the need for perfection. In general, purposefulness and the absence of fantasy are unlike Rivers. Ambiguity is thus waiting in the wings, in this case references to genre movies, exemplified in part by image distortion reminiscent of an old horror movie.

Things is a lyrical analysis of the objects we gather around us, split into sections loosely based on the seasons. Rivers’ films are, typically, intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities. In Things however, he turns his attention to the unexplored objects, thoughts and memories from inside his own home. The film is a collision of individual fragments of video and sound, which together complete an abstract, humorous and intimate picture. In the Summer section for example, we witness a squirrel attacking a coconut model of another squirrel. In its attention to small moments, the film is a rumination of the things we gather around us.

A collection of films from an eclectic array of contributors commissioned to raise funds for the Bristol independent cinema The Cube.

May Tomorrow Shine the Brightest of All Your Many Days As It Will Be Your Last (2009, co-directed with Paul Harnden) shakily shows cloaked figures moving through woods, followed by soldiers, and seeking quiet places to read, seemingly in escape from some kind of disaster. A metallic ring obscures words spoken offscreen; wind blows through shimmering trees. It’s only occasionally that we see faces beneath their cloaks—a solemn old man, a blankly gazing old woman.

Eden Kötting draws bright images on transparent glass, while talking with her dad about the world and the people who run it.

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

The great Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet telling two stories to Shakib.

“This masterfully edited compilation documentary analyzes the morphology of the horror film. Stringing together the most common tropes and scenes of slashers, zombie flicks, slumber party massacres, etc. into a single meta-horror opus, Rivers not so much deconstructs the genre as provides a tribute that reveals its limitations but also its visceral power. It’s films like this that explain why I do film programs like ‘Experiments in Terror’” – Noel Lawrence, Provocateur Pictures.

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

Shooting against the staggering beauty of the Moroccan landscape, from the rugged terrain of the Atlas Mountains to the stark and surreal emptiness of the desert, with its encroaching sands and abandoned film sets, a director abandons his own film set and descends into a hallucinatory, perilous adventure of cruelty, madness and malevolence. A Paul Bowles story combined with observational footage forms a multi-layered excavation into the illusion of cinema itself.

“A meditation on the illusion of filmmaking, shot behind the scenes on a film being made on the otherworldly beaches of Sidi Ifni, Morocco. The film depicts strange activities, with no commentary or dialogue; it appears as a fragment of film, dug up in a distant future—a hazy, black-and-white hallucinogenic world.”—Ben Rivers

Set in a deserted, silent at, laden with mementoes and artefacts belonging to a now departed inhabitant. The film pieces together an elusive biography of a traveller to far flung destinations. There is a heavy stillness in the deserted space, the inhabitants faded memories are retraced by Rivers, but remain inescapably unresolved; narratives flicker and then disperse in succession; the immateriality of life is reflected in the material left behind.

A portrait of the painter Rose Wylie at work in her studio at home in Kent. Shots from her house and studio, including details of encrusted paint pots, brushes, paintings, drawings and magazine clippings demonstrate Wylie’s divergent reference material which ranges from historical figures and celebrity culture to the everyday objects around her.

This new work is developed from footage collected during a trip to the remote and beautiful sub-tropical island of Vanuatu in the South Pacific. In March 2015, after Rivers’ visit, Vanuatu was devastated by Cyclone Pam, laying waste large parts of the islands. River’s 16mm lm material has become a record of a place that has irrevocably changed. Filmed on 16mm and then digitised, island imagery of active volcanoes, underwater WW2 debris, children playing, and wrecked boats transform into intangible digital recollections of the island. Images of the eroded land merge with eroding lm and deteriorate until they are no longer recognisable.

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

Arctic Circle. The solitary person in the landscape is the unseen one behind the camera. After a long hike, he camps through a storm down in a valley facing out to sea. There, he comes across an eerie group of abandoned buildings built in the late 1970’s for a film adaptation of a novel by Norwegian author and Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun.

Made for Somewhere From Here to Heaven, exhibition at Askuna Zentroa, Bilbao.

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

On the island of Tanna, a part of Vanuatu, an archipelago in Melanesia, strange rites are enacted and time passes slowly while the inhabitants await the return of the mysterious John.

It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home – only the millions of last moments... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.” Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow A(nother) collaboration between film artists Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, the figures in this installation represent a conceptual prequel to the inquiry present in their feature project *A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness*. Taking its title from the Greek tragedian Aeschulys, *CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD* presents a group of viking re-enactors whose vertiginous actions are variably synched to an explosive real-time collage of early black metal recordings. Man and violence, ritual and play, death as the dream of infinity.

IN TRANSIT created opportunities for artists and 46 young people with complex needs to collaborate on individual film portraits over an eight year period to 2013. The films describe each young person in a way that is personal, poetic and expansive integrating art into the processes of consultation and person centre planning during transition services. The films played a role in the future lives of the young people involved by revealing their individuality and means of accessing the world. They also informed social care providers, support workers and others involved in planning and providing services about their lives and aspirations.

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

Shot in a creaky, wooden-floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day “forum of ideas” focusing on the manifold possibilities of “Resistance”, the film initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

In this short film of Cowan Court, which was completed by 6a architects in late 2016, Rivers has turned his camera onto the interactions between architecture and landscape within which the students of Churchill College, University of Cambridge live and work.

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

Bogancloch is where Jake Williams lives, nestled in a vast highland forest of Scotland. The film portrays his life throughout the seasons, with other people occasionally crossing into his otherwise solitary life. At the heart a song, an argument between life and death, each stating their case to rule over the world. The film is without exposition, it aims at something less recognisable, a different existence of reality observed in discrete moments. A sequel to Two Years at Sea (2011), charting a subtly changing life in a radically changing world.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A man at three disparate moments in his life: as a member of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island, alone in the wilderness of Northern Finland and as the singer of a neo-pagan black metal band in Norway. Three moments for a radical proposition for the creation of utopia in the present.

A film of a sloth, using three-colour separation to show sloth time.

Reframing our current political moment in intimate terms, Gibson’s urgent snapshot of worldwide social calamities doubles as a document of practical resistance. In Gibson’s hands, the music of Pauline Oliveros and the words of poets CA Conrad and Eileen Myles imbue images of street riots, the Grenfell Fire, and the mass refugee migration with complexity and grace.

Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

A tribute to Alice, the survivor of Friday 13th, edited from a VHS tape.

Based on Gertrude Stein’s eponymously named screenplay, written in 1929 as European fascism was building momentum. Beatrice Gibson’s adaptation, set almost a century later in contemporary Paris, deploys Stein’s script as a talismanic guide through a contemporary moment of comparable social and political unrest. An original soundtrack, written especially for the film by British composer Laurence Crane, responds to the repetition, duplication and duality at play in Stein’s script. Both a fictional thriller and an act of collective representation, Deux Soeurs proposes empathy and friendship as means to reckon with an increasingly turbulent present.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

Explores the landscape and stories within the community of Krabi, Southern Thailand. A major tourist destination in Thailand, the filmmakers want to capture the town in this specific moment where the pre-historic, the more recent past and the contemporary world collide, sometimes uneasily.

Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.

Ben Rivers' films study the otherworldly, looking for places and stories outside the daily conventions of reality. Look Then Below was filmed in a Somerset transformed into a coloured, mist-enveloped island in an oily ocean with a cave basking in a subterranean glow. Time seems to stand still there. After Slow Action and Urth, this is the final part of a trilogy developed with American SF author Mark von Schlegell.

Rivers and Suwichakornpong’s first collaboration, commissioned by the 2018 Thai Biennale.

I First Saw the Light channels the vestige of Joseph Carey Merrick’s surviving output. Better known as The Elephant Man, he produced a little noticed two-page autobiography, sold to those attending a freak show in which he was displayed, opposite the royal London hospital in London's Whitechapel High Street. There is one surviving copy of the pamphlet. Its text is coupled with starkly filmed sequences of a model church he also constructed, now hermetically sealed within a glass and ebony container, together forming the basis for this poignant, silent film. A reminder of Merrick’s profound humanity in the face of extreme adversity, it also serves as an auto-biographical footnote and reminder of David Lynch’s eponymous feature film on Merrick, in which the model is a central motif and metaphor for his psychological and emotional fluctuations.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

A portrait of Astika, who lives on an island in Denmark. He has lived in a run down farm house for 15 years and his project has been to let the land around him grow unchecked, but now he has been forced to move out by people who prefer more pristine neighbours.

Jake Williams performs the song 'More Than Just A Dram' while making tea on an open fire.

A portrait of an old school house on the tidal island of Eilean Seòna within Scotland's Inner Hebrides, accompanied by the Wallace Stevens poem 'The House Was Quiet.

It is always hard like this, not having a world, to imagine one, to go to the far edge apart and imagine, to wall whether in or out, to build a kind of cage for the sake of feeling the bars around us, to give shape to a world. And oh, it is always a world and not the world. – William Bronk

Rooms in an abandoned, burnt out house revealed by multiple in-camera superimpositions of a single torch-light. This marked the start of my hand-processing of film, which I continue to use.

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

"My first film, shot at art school on a crappy Super 8 camera I bought from the market. At the time I was obsessed with Universal Studios horror films, and Dreyer’s Vampyr, and I had just discovered three films by George Kuchar, and Alain Resnais. So it’s a mix of those, sort of. It was shot over many months, as I had to coerce my friends to give me their time, especially the lead, who required many hours of make-up before he killed my friends. It’s a play on Jekyll and Hyde, though how clear this is to the viewer I’m pretty uncertain.” - Ben Rivers

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.