The award-winning artist on how a film location in Morocco inspired his latest installationBorn in 1972 in Somerset,Ben Rivers studied sculpture then moved into photography and film. He won the Fipresci international critics prize at the Venice film festival in 2011 for Two Years at Sea . Last year he created the multi-projection installation The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, co-commissioned by Artangel, or in the BBC’s since largely demolished television centre in London. This month the installation will be at Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery.
For this show,five films are projected in a “salvaged cinema made of plywood flats. How would you record the installation?
It’s a multiple-screen version of looking at films being made in Morocco. I shot it near Ouarzazate, which is used by film crews as a double for many places such as the Middle East, or the wild west,Tibet. You’ll find semi-abandoned sets from Lawrence of Arabia and Orson Welles’s Othello or TV series, just standing there in the desert. From a distance they look like genuine places, and but up close you can see the backs of things. I wanted to originate a film approximately the construction of films – and I’ve built viewing spaces that mimic these sets. So the piece looks at the layers of reality in film-making,and within that there are other stories going on.
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Source: theguardian.com