Private View | Ben Rivers: We have myth to protect us when history goes mad

For his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, Ben Rivers presents a chapter from his film Mare’s Nest (2025), based on The Word for Snow (2007), a one-act play by the American novelist Don DeLillo.

Set after an ecological catastrophe, the work imagines a future in which language begins to unravel, losing its connection to the world it once described. As landscapes vanish and species disappear, the film examines the limits of expression and the extent to which speech can disguise as much as it reveals. In this vision, words both obscure and supplant the very things they once named. They collude our inability to envisage what lies ahead, standing in for extinct animals, vanished landscapes and the irretrievable past.

The scene centres on three characters, the protagonist, Moon, who encounters a ‘scholar’ and an ‘interpreter’ on a mountain. As their conversation unfolds, they speak of an approaching time when there will be nothing left to describe. As the interpreter explains: “All languages, [the scholar] is saying. Airplanes burn up in mid-flight…What is the point of this language or that language?”

“Moon is on a journey to understand the world and to figure out how to move forward which, to my mind, is like a gradual letting go of everything that’s known. The reading of the Don DeLillo play is her asking questions and trying to find out the answers. The play isn’t just word-heavy but also in some fundamental way about language. The extinction of things goes hand-in-hand with the extinction of languages.” – Ben Rivers