Exhibition

Opening hours:

20.06 - 03.07 / 13.07 - 20.09 (new date)
2:00-6:00 PM
04.07 – 12.07
02:00-12:00 PM

Free entry

AH, LIBERTY!

Ben Rivers, 2008
United Kingdom | USA | 0:20:00 | 16 mm Loop | Sound

A family's place in the wilderness - living, working, playing on a farm throughout the seasons; free-range animals and children, junk and nature, all within the most sublime landscape. The work aims at a sense of freedom, the scale of which is reflected in the hand-processed Scope format. There's no particular story; beginning, middle or end, just fragments of lives lived.

RIVER RITES

Ben Russell, 2011
United Kingdom  USA  0:11:30  HD Video Loop  Sound

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others.“ (Graham Harvey, Animism)

A trance dance water implosion, a newer line drawn between secular possession and religious phenomena. Filmed in one shot at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist everyday are revealed as time itself is undone.  Rites are the new trypps; embodiment is our eternal everything.

A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS

Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, 2014

# 1 BLACK METAL
Reino Unido United Kingdom  EUA USA  00:23:07  HD Video Loop • Som Sound
# 2 COMUNE
Reino Unido United Kingdom  EUA USA  00:35:15  HD Video Loop • Som Sound

# 3 SOLITUDE
Reino Unido United Kingdom  EUA USA  00:23:22  HD Video Loop • Som
Sound
A Spell to Ward off the Darkness is a collaboration between artist-filmmakers Ben Rivers (UK) and Ben Russell (US), presented as a multi-channel installation (film transferred to video) . In the three-part film, parallel narratives mix documentary and constructed situations in locations ranging from a small commune on an Estonian island, to the long summer twilight of northern Finland, and the darkness of an underground music club in Norway. The film's sections traverse speculative social formations, an introspective rumination on the self, and an intense and animistic incantation.

CALL NO MAN HAPPY UNTIL HE IS DEAD

Ben Rivers, Ben Russell, 2013
United Kingdom  USA  0:06:30  HD Video Loop  Sound  6 vinyl players

"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 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.