Ben Rivers

Ben Rivers is an artist and filmmaker repre-sented by Kate MacGarry Gallery in London. Awards include the EYE Art Film Prize, 2016; FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, 68th Venice Film Festival for his first feature film Two Years At Sea; Baloise Art Prize, Art Basel 42, for Sack Barrow; Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Art-ists, 2010; twice winner of the Tiger Award at Rotterdam Film Festival, twice shortlisted for the Jarman Award, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in 2015.  Recent solo shows include Urthworks, Hestercombe Gallery, Somerset;  Phantoms, Triennale, Milan; Urth, The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Islands, Kunstverein of Hamburg; Earth Needs More Magicians, Camden Arts Centre, London; The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, Artangel, London and Whitworth Museum, Manchester.  His work is held in collections including Tate Modern, Hamburg Kunsthalle, FRAC Île-de-France, Ville de Geneve and National Museum of Scotland. He recently collaborated on a new feature film Krabi, 2562, with Anocha Suwichakornpong, which pre-miered at Locarno Film Festival.

A world without adults. Groups of kids live unfet-tered by the tyranny of adulthood. A girl leaves prison, picked up by a boy in a car. They return to their friends living in a vast quarry on an island. They perform plays for one another. They talk about love, death and creatures of the night.
A young minotaur is confused in a labyrinth. The girl leaves on a pilgrimage, going through an underworld populated by decrepit adults barely seen. She emerges into another land, climbs a mountain and meets a sage and their translator. She asks the sage about the Earth, the times, language, the future. Only partially satisfied by mysterious answers, the girl leaves to find her own way in the world. She hot wires a car and drives along a desert highway listening to her favourite song, shutting her eyes, laughing.

Mare’s Nest,
a film by Ben Rivers