Ben Rivers: The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, exhibition review: a complex web blurring fiction and reality
The Drama Block in Television Centre in Wood Lane is where BBC sets were constructed and painted before moving to the studios and forming the backdrops to many of our collective memories.
The chance to explore this now-deserted former hive of theatrical artifice is irresistible. Typically, it’s Artangel, prolific producers of atmospheric installations, who’ve given us the opportunity, and several works by Ben Rivers haunt the space.
Rivers’s films, cut from the raw materials that will lead to a feature film, are based in Morocco and focus on the behind-the-scenes process of creating cinematic stories.
Set in makeshift cinemas built from recycled BBC sets, they capture, among other things, the Spaniard Oliver Laxe and the British artist Shezad Dawood at work on films in the Moroccan landscape and Mohammed Mrabet, a Moroccan artist, telling jokes and fables.
It amounts to a complex web of moving image, sound and architectural space, a poetic meditation on the creative process and the blurring of fiction and reality.
Until August 31 (020 7713 1400, artangel.org.uk)
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