Ben Rivers: We have myth to protect us when history goes mad

6 Mar-11 Apr 2026

Overview

For his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Ben Rivers presents a chapter from his film Mare’s Nest (2025), based on The Word for Snow (2007), a one-act play by the American novelist Don DeLillo.

Set after an ecological catastrophe, the work imagines a future in which language begins to unravel, losing its connection to the world it once described. As landscapes vanish and species disappear, the film examines the limits of expression and the extent to which speech can disguise as much as it reveals. In this vision, words both obscure and supplant the very things they once named. They collude our inability to envisage what lies ahead, standing in for extinct animals, vanished landscapes and the irretrievable past.

The scene centres on three characters, the protagonist, Moon, who encounters a ‘scholar’ and an ‘interpreter’ on a mountain. As their conversation unfolds, they speak of an approaching time when there will be nothing left to describe. As the interpreter explains: “All languages, [the scholar] is saying. Airplanes burn up in mid-flight...What is the point of this language or that language?”

“Moon is on a journey to understand the world and to figure out how to move forward which, to my mind, is like a gradual letting go of everything that’s known. The reading of the Don DeLillo play is her asking questions and trying to find out the answers. The play isn’t just word-heavy but also in some fundamental way about language. The extinction of things goes hand-in-hand with the extinction of languages.” - Ben Rivers

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.

In 2025 Mare’s Nest won the Pardo Verde at the Locarno Film Festival. In 2013 he was awarded the Artangel Open Commission with the resulting film, The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, presented at The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester in 2016. Ben Rivers’ first feature-length film, Two Years at Sea, was presented in 2011 at the 68th Venice International Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize. Its sequel, Bogancloch, was released in 2024 and was nominated for Best Film at the Locarno Film Festival.

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, London (2019); Urth, Renaissance Society, Chicago, (2016); Islands, Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany (2016); Earth Needs More Magicians, Camden Arts Centre, London (2015) and Fable, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Germany (2014).

Group exhibitions include National Treasures: Constable in Bristol “Truth to Nature”, Bristol Museum, UK (2024); Somewhere from here to heaven, Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, Spain (2022); Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary, Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2022); Eye Art & Film Prize Hito Steyerl, Ben Rivers and Wang Bing, Eye Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2018) and Museum of Clouds, Tate Modern, London (2018).

Artists