A masterclass on the various natures of time: as subject, as feeling, as medium, as space. In a moving image practice that spans over two decades, the relative construct that we call time has formed the central inquiry for filmmaker / artist / performer Ben Russell’s work. From the animist jungle time of equatorial Suriname to the horizontal time of an anarchist collective in western France to the haptic experience of Being, temporality is a vehicle by which we can arrive at a transformative understanding of subject, self and audience as a simultaneity that is unique to cinema. Topically speaking, this masterclass can be viewed as a Venn Diagram in which activism, Einstein, ethnography, labor, noise music, and trance cinema are all equally represented.

biografia

Ben Russell (1976) is an American artist, filmmaker and curator whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena. Russell was an exhibiting artist at documenta 14 (2017) and his work has been presented at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art Chicago, the Venice Film Festival and the Berlinale, among others. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008), a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2010, Gijón 2017), premiered his second and third feature films at the Locarno Film Festival (2013, 2017) and won the Encounters Grand Prize at the Berlinale Film Festival (2024). Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017) and Double Vision (Marseille, France 2024). He is currently based in Marseille, France.

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