Rivers’ filmic trialogue presents a dystopia of language and representation, flickering ceaselessly between reverent and polemical.

The pre-fab screening room that takes up the majority of Kate McGarry limits light ascetically. The black-and-white film doesn’t offer a lot of light to reflect off the mostly black interior. The only source of light, fitted in a white box on the floor, is the projector itself. Skipping over the obvious connections between firelight and filmic light, this sets the precedent for the film as a guiding light through cultural darkness that feels all too familiar in 2026. And, while the guiding quality of the film may be caught up in adapting the knotty concepts of the source text, the treatise on language and culture on display is nonetheless insightful and comprehensive.

The film that the show centres around is an extract from Rivers’ 2025 feature Mare’s Nest. This extract presents the central idea of the film, which is based on a one act play by Don DeLillo called The Word For Snow (2007). Rivers’ rendition keeps impending climate change in mind, though brings the conversation into a space of futurity, preservation and global responsibility by casting children in his leading roles. In this installation, three of these children sit around a fire; one is a traveller, who has come to talk with a sage-like scholar, who speaks in an enigmatic way (supposedly “all languages”). A third character, dressed in a suit, acts as the translator and interlocutor of the conversation. There is no established time—in fact, according to the scholar, “time is a lie”—and the clothes are a meld of traditional and contemporary.

The way the work treats the past is where its strengths lie. Not only is it ambiguous, but the usual language of a great return that peppers the film is always delivered hesitantly, the caveats too numerous. There are many contemporary references—or at least ideas that are instantly recognisable as such—and yet the dystopian feeling frames these as nostalgia for the present. In his intentional ambiguity, Rivers seems to have found the perfect way to present a nuanced worldview, irreducible to an object of rage bait, representing instead the complex feelings towards progress that we all feel in the present day.

The trade-off here, however, is an attempt in the film to communicate an individual concept of progress (or even the overlap of two; Rivers’ and DeLillo’s). It feels right for Rivers to present breakdowns of language and culture through the medium of language and culture, however, somewhat inevitably with this sort of philosophical endeavour, it requires intense attention. The trialogue regularly falls over itself—to the benefit of its thesis, but to the detriment of the viewer’s understanding of it. It would be over-optimistic to assume that the world Rivers is describing through his characters is one where everyone has the time to understand each other fully. Nonetheless, the sort of world that takes shape in what we can glean from the cryptic conversation is one with all the same issues as our own.

Indeed, in our world, it isn’t an ecological disaster but we who have unravelled language structures through our politics and technology (perhaps what Rivers is pointing to with the plane “burning up mid-flight” metaphor for language). Surely our ability to understand these points in the complex trialogue count for something? At least for the coherence of the work but also for the hope that we still have some logical grounding in reality that we can hold onto?

While the monist manifesto for the world that Rivers lifts from DeLillo is conceptually chewy (though definitely works in this post-disaster fiction), ideas around the futility of language, particularly in relation to social and cultural differences, are undoubtedly recognisable. The slippages in the work provide moments of reflection; the kind one would have sitting around a campfire (even if we must settle for the digital light of a projector).

Ben Rivers: We have myth to protect us when history goes mad is on show at Kate MacGarry until 11th April 2026. For updates on projects happening at the gallery, visit their website.

Image: Ben Rivers, The Word for Snow, 2025, 16mm colour film, sound, 18 minutes 32 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.