Described as he most ambitious work to date, Ben River’s The Two Eyes are Not Brothers encompasses an adaptation of Paul Bowles’s 1947 brutal short story A Distant Episode, about the atrocities befalling a Western linguist wandering North Africa, along with elements from the life and stories of Moroccan writer and artist Mohammed Mrabet and visits to the sets of Moroccan-based films by Spanish director Oliver Laxe and British artist Shezad Dawood.
Bowles’s fate saw him attached and abducted by a band of Reguibat nomads, his tongue severed, and clothed in a rustily opalescent suit of tin-can lids and made to dance on command for his new owners’ amusement, so don’t attend if you are of sensitive deposition.
The project was originally commissioned through Open 2013 by Artangel in association with BBC Radio 4.All filmed in hand-processed 16mm cinemascope, it was originally shown last summer at Television Centre in London, Rivers’ has used materials sourced from old film sets to create viewing spaces within the gallery, and inserted works into collection displays, creating a new dialogue with the spaces and collections at the Whitworth.
Rivers is no stranger to filming in unique and isolated spaces, his previous films led him to the remote expanses of Northern Finland in A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013), the Scottish highlands of Two Years at Sea (2011) and such far-flung locales as a deserted city on the Japanese island of Gunkanjima and the Polynesian archipelago of Tuvalu in Slow Action (2010).
Rivers, born in Somerset in 1972 has seen his films screened worldwide at numerous festivals including Rotterdam Film Festival, where he twice won a Tiger Award for Short Film. His second feature film, co-directed with Ben Russell, A Spell To Ward Off The Darkness, premiered at Locarno International Film Festival, and won top prizes at CPH:DOX and Torino Film Festival. Between 1995 and 2005 he co-programmed Brighton Cinematheque. He is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.
The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers is a co-commission with Artangel.
25 February – 22 May 2016.
