Artist in Focus: Ben Rivers: Short Films

In the short films British artist Ben Rivers has made over the past two decades, he records his encounters with artists, geologists, children, friends, workers, mudlarkers, masked utopians, sailors long gone ashore, scientists, collectors, travellers, and more besides. What unites Rivers’s motley dramatis personae, beyond the fact that they all make appearances before his camera? Perhaps little. Then again, the protagonists of these films are all in one way or another concerned with breaking from the crowd—to live differently, to enter other temporalities, to create new worlds within and, in some cases, against the one that exists.

Often working with photochemical film in artisanal and speculative ways, Rivers digs into the rumble of everyday and soars towards the expansiveness of the planetary in films that pose distinct challenges to anthropocentric perspectives and narratives of progress.

Curated by Erika Balsom