The former headquarters of the BBC in White City, west London, where shows such as Monty Python’s Flying Circus were once filmed, is re-opening its doors to the public for Artangel’s latest commission, a cinematic installation by the UK artist Ben Rivers (26 June - 31 August).
The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers is dotted around former scenery and props workshops in the Drama Block of the famous TV complex, which closed in 2013. Viewing rooms constructed from salvaged film sets are also used to screen parts of the work.
Rivers has adapted a 1947 short story by the US author Paul Bowles, A Distant Episode, filming scenes in 16mm cinemascope in Tangier and the Sahara Desert. Bowles’s storytelling muse, Mohammed Mrabet, plays himself in the piece.
Rivers interweaves this narrative with behind-the-scenes footage from two other films produced in Morocco by the London-based artist Shezad Dawood (Towards the Possible Film) and the Paris-born filmmaker Oliver Laxe (Las Mimosas). Laxe is also the protagonist in A Distant Episode, momentarily leaving his own film set to appear in Rivers’s production.
Speaking at the preview today, 23 June, Rivers described the installation as “a fragmented, exploded series of things talking to each other in a spider diagram way”, adding that his aim was to make a film “about the construction of film-making”. According to the Artangel website, Rivers’s “practice treads a line between documentary and fiction”.
The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers was commissioned by Artangel, a London-based arts organisation, and the British Film Institute’s Film Fund. The Whitworth in Manchester, where the film will be shown next year, is another project partner.