It's About Time

British artist and filmmaker Ben Rivers shares his fascination for time in his first exhibition in Belgium presenting four of his recent film installations: Now, at Last! (2018), Ghost Strata (2019), Ijen/London (2022) and The Minotaur (2023). A selection of photographs, drawings and watercolours complete the exhibition, plunging us deeper into the striking imagery of Rivers’ otherworldly times and spaces.

The exhibition opens with a portrait of Cherry, a sloth filmed at the Jaguar Rescue Centre in Costa Rica. Now, at Last! immerses you in the temporality of this beautiful animal to the soundtrack of the jungle and the musings on love and time in Unchained Melody. As writer and curator Filipa Ramos says accurately: ‘who needs speed when time can do so much.’

Also interrogating the nature of time, and how cinema can shape our conceptions of past and present realities is the journal-like collage film Ghost Strata. The work borrows its title from a specific geological phenomenon where missing elements from within the rock strata, despite their absence, offer hints of what was once there. Divided into the 12 months of the year, and charting the personal movements of Rivers across the globe, the film explores the differing scales of impact that humanity’s presence has on the earth in the past, present and into the future.

Whilst filmed in the present, the landscape of Ijen/London projects us into a post-apocalyptic future devoid of human presence but not of life. On the soundtrack, we hear Herbert Read’s reading of his poem The Autumn of the World which contemplates a devastated world of chaos and decay, “blood-flecked clouds” and “vermilioned vastness”.

Opening with a Menorcan folk song about a man riding a donkey, then falling off, The Minotaur tells the tale of the young Minotaur and his failed attempts to befriend children his age. Filmed around an abandoned and transformed quarry on the island of Menorca, the work was inspired by experimental filmmaker Bruce Baillie’s love of mythology, silent film storytelling, sunlight and movement, and captures the energy of both the site as well as the young cast running around in it. The Minotaur is the first chapter of a longer film, made in a world with only children, going about their lives, rituals, game playing and journeys. Something to look forward to…

Curator: Karen Verschooren