The Colony of Light is a provisionally utopian film collective led by artists Ben Rivers & Ben Russell. Under the spiritual guidance of curator Aily Nash, this 15-person-strong group of visionary humans produced a finite number of 16mm portraits and audio recordings of the Future (as envisioned in the first-person present) during their weeklong residency at the Colony. Image and sound records were processed during the day and projected onto a screen under the stars in the evening. --BR & BR
The second after-hours screening of A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS.
EXPO Colony residents on the scaffolding of the EXPO Colony structure.
EXPO Colony resident dances in the courtyard of MoMA PS1.
Ben Russell set-up the film projector after hours for A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS: II. COLLECTIVITY, OR UTOPIA IS A SOCIAL BODY in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. The Colony of Light
Module
Venue
Week 1
June 27—July 5, 2013
Hosts
Aily Nash
Ben Russell
Ben Rivers
Residents
Basma Alsharif
Peter Burr
Steve Cossman
Bonnie Jones
Jodie Mack
Xander Marro
Jonathan Schwartz
Fern Silva
Ruthy Somalo
The Colony of Light produced a collaborative 16mm film which was shot, processed and screened by the artists during their week-long residency in EXPO Colony.
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS, a screening series curated by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell, was conceived around themes explored in their collaborative film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (2013). The six-part screening series was organized for EXPO 1: New York by independent curator Aily Nash in conjunction with EXPO Cinema and EXPO Colony.
During his residency in EXPO Colony, BEN RIVERS gave a lecture in EXPO School on his film in development, After London. In the lecture Ben Rivers presents a possible future England and discusses landscape transformation, toxic wastelands and the co-existence of multiple, diverging Utopias.