Event overview
Ben Rivers with Mark von Schlegell
SLOW ACTION
45 MIN 16MM ANAMORPHIC COLOUR 1:2.65
2010
A post-apocalyptic science fiction film which exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Earth in the distant future, when the sea level has risen to absurd heights forming new isolated islands and archipelagos. Two narrators read accounts from a great library of Utopias, describing the four islands seen in the film.
URTH
20 MIN S16 COLOUR 16:9
2016
The last woman on Earth, perhaps. Her logbook accounts her struggles with sustaining her world, sanity and dedication to her unforgiving sealed environment. Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, it forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments, and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavour such as Biosphere 2 might mean today in terms of human kind’s relationship with the natural world. Urth takes its title from the Old Norse word suggesting the twisted threads of fate. It was commissioned by The Renaissance Society, Chicago.
Ben (online) will be in conversation with Gareth Evans (live) after the screening.
Ben Rivers was born in Somerset, UK in 1972 and lives and works in London. Rivers’ films are typically intimate portrayals of solitary beings or isolated communities; his practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Rivers uses these themes as a starting point from which to imagine alternative narratives and existences in marginal worlds. Recent solo exhibitions include Ghost Strata and other stories, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2023); It’s About Time, STUK, Leuven, Belgium (2023); After London, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2022); Urthworks, Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, Norway (2021) and Hestercombe House, Somerset, UK (2020); Now, at Last!, Kate MacGarry Gallery, London (2019); Urth, Renaissance Society, Chicago, (2016). In 2013 he was awarded the Artangel Open Commission with the resulting film, The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, presented at the derelict BBC Television Centre in 2015 and at The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester in 2016. Rivers’ first feature-length film, Two Years at Sea, was presented in September 2011 at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize.
Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film / event curator and producer, host and documentary mentor. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books and curates their Screen at Home series. From 2012 - 2023 he was the Adjunct Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery. He has written many catalogue essays and articles on place culture, artists and the moving image, as well as the extensive text for Radiohead's KID A MNESIA catalogue. He has co-written the film Wayfaring Stranger (Andrea Luka Zimmerman, IFF Rotterdam 2024) and produced Schneewittchen (Stanley Schtinter, IFF Rotterdam 2024).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Feb 2024 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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