Ben Rivers

Film

An eclipse is revealed to be something other than it seems. A building in the desert, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a charade. The work I have made focuses on cinematic illusion – the magic that began when the Lumiere brothers showed a film of a wall being demolished in reverse. The 16mm loop and the series of photographs come from two separate ongoing projects. The eclipse film is part of a longer series of short films I am making in my home over the course of one year – a home movie of sorts, using my immediate surroundings, objects, books, as source material to play with scale, associations, intimacy, the past and the future. The photographic series is part of my research for a large-scale project in Morocco, which uses the genre of the behind-the-scenes films as a model. The images were taken while location scouting around Ouarzazate, ‘the door of the desert’, in southern-central Morocco. Ouarzazate has long been a destination for film production, with two film studios and many desert locations, which mimic multiple countries from ancient Rome (Gladiator) to Tibet (Kundun). Driving around the desert we found an abandoned film set, becoming part of the landscape – from a distance you would think it was a functioning village, then, as you get closer, you begin to see the signs of it’s artifice and emptiness of life. Cinema is about world-making, a world which hovers between reality and fiction, and this work is an exploration into that world.

Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers lives in London. Awards include the EYE Art Film Prize; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel; Tiger Award IFF Rotterdam. Solo shows include « Phantoms », Triennale, Milan; « Urth », The Renaissance Society, Chicago; « Islands », Kunstverein of Hamburg; « Earth Needs More Magicians », Camden Arts Centre, London.

Remerciements

Yasmina Benabderrahmane and Anna-Katharina Scheidegger.