Ben Rivers

A delirious sci-fi riff on the Arabian Nights' 'Tale of the Hunchback', that submerges us in a technological dystopia reigned by Dalaya.com, a mega-corporation that forces its employees to 'relax' at company-run medieval reenactments.

Six women in Paris traverse the neon-soaked anxiety of the city after dark.

Slow Action, Ben Rivers’ first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film that brings together a series of four 16mm works which exist somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction. Continuing his exploration of curious and extraordinary environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography - the study of how species and eco-systems evolve differently when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitat - to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years; the sea level rising to absurd heights, creating hyperbolic utopias that appear as possible future mini-societies. This series of constructed realities explores the environments of self-contained lands and the search for information to enable the reconstruction of soon to be lost worlds.

The last woman on Earth: Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, Urth forms a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. The film considers what an endeavor such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

Filmed in various places over the globe, Ghost Strata explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future. Found sound and text create a meditation on time, memory, leftovers and extinction.

Moon travels through a mysterious unexplained world free of adults. Moon meets a scholar turned sage and her translator in a mountain hut, where she tries to understand what is happening, based on a play by Don DeLillo. She meets many others who perform for her, show her a film, give her gifts, show her different possibilities for living. She observes and moves on into an unknown future.

Inspired by Richard Jefferies’ late 19th-century ‘After London’ - one of the earliest post-apocalyptic novels - the film serves as test footage for how a future London might look. How a city that no longer exists might appear, having disappeared. Instead, in its place a vast toxic swamp, spewing ocherous smoke and chemical waste, with electric blue sulphurous flames emerging from the dead land. Shot on location in and amongst the craters and sulphur mines of the Ijen volcano complex in Indonesia, the imagery is accompanied by a recording of Herbert Read reciting his poem ‘The Autumn of the World’.

“The wind, one brilliant day, called to my soul with an odor of jasmine.” Last autumn, actress Tang Wei softly recited these lines in English while sitting beside director Ben Rivers on a fallen tree trunk in the outskirts of London. Together, they carefully searched for the poem's rhythm, as the wind rustled through the trees.