Ben Rivers: Between art and cinema
This autumn, Kunstnernes Hus invites you to take a deep dive into the work of the British artist Ben Rivers. Rivers will be presented with the exhibition Urthworks in the lower exhibition hall, with films at Kunstnernes Hus Cinema and two artist talks. The artist works with moving images in the form of feature films and shortfilms that are shown both as installations in galleries and in cinemas.
Published
For the past 15 years, Ben Rivers has explored extraterrestrial experiences in everyday life, nomadic life, spirituality, rituals and film's ability to create worlds and transforming experiences. Central to the life forms that his films explore are silence, slowness and immersion in peculiar projects.
With an interest in Victorian utopia novels such as Francis Bacon's "The New Atlantis" and Mary Shelley's "The Last Man", as well as the science fiction works of Mark von Schlegell (with whom he has collaborated for the Urthworks trilogy), Rivers creates a recurring "balladic" feeling of an underlying dystopia and what life may look like after a climatic apocalypse.
Rivers moves naturally between the fields of film and visual art. He is less interested in genres and labels than in cinema itself as an art form that can accommodate a wide range of expressions. This also applies to his film curatorial activities in shape of the screening series "The Machine that Kills Bad People" at ICA in London.
Rivers is a welcome guest at Kunstnernes Hus and Kunstnernes Hus Cinema, where we work actively to build bridges between visual art and film.
