SPECIAL SCREENING: The Rare Event

Shot in a creaky, wooden floored Parisian recording studio at an inaugural three-day "forum of ideas" focusing on the manifold possibilities of Resistance (the title of Jean-François Lyotard's unrealized follow-up exhibition to his 1983 Les Immateriaux), occasional collaborators Ben Rivers and Ben Russell have produced what initially appears to be a structuralist document of a philosophical discussion in-the-round. This "appearance dimension" is deceptive, of course, and with the aid of an immersive 5.1 sound-mix, a Green Man, a Green-Man-shaped-Infinite-Void, a dose of kinetic digital magic (courtesy of US-based artist Peter Burr) and an impressive cast of thinkers, critics, curators and artists, a document of Resistance slowly transforms into 'The Rare Event' – a portal that joins all dimensions into one.

Ben Russell (b.1976, USA) is an artist and filmmaker whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena and evoking the research of Jean Rouch, Maya Deren and Michael Snow, among others. Russell received a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2009) for his first feature film Let Each One Go Where He May, and was a participating artist in documenta 14. His second feature film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (co-directed with Ben Rivers), premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2013. Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), and Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017). He currently resides in Los Angeles.

Ben Rivers is an artist and filmmaker represented by Kate MacGarry Gallery in London. Rivers recently won the second EYE Art Film Prize 2016, as well as the 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 Artists, 2010. Recent solo shows include 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 most recent feature film, The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, premiered in the main competition at Locarno International Film Festival.