Ben Frost
Ben Frost is a composer, sound artist, and stage director born in Melbourne, Australia, currently based in Athens, after the past twenty years in Reykjavík, Iceland. His practice spans studio recordings, large-scale sound installations, live performance, opera, and collaboration across dance, theatre, and film.
His discography includes Theory of Machines, By the Throat, AURORA, The Centre Cannot Hold, and Scope Neglect. Screen work includes the score for Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves, Netflix's Dark, and more recently Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ‘36 and Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love.
A decade-long collaboration with artist Richard Mosse has produced three major multichannel installations: The Enclave, Incoming, and Broken Spectre. His first opera The Wasp Factory premiered in London’s Royal Opera House; The Murder of Halit Yozgat, developed with Forensic Architecture, premiered at Hannover Staatsoper. Frost is the protegé of Brian Eno as part of the Rolex Arts Initiative, and is currently Artist in Residence at Onassis Ready.
Prometheus is a large-scale multichannel video and sound installation taking Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound as its structural frame. We meet the Titan after millennia of confinement: a political prisoner speaking across time, resigned but defiant. His punishment, a warning to those who expose what power seeks to control.
Performers are captured by cinematographer Trevor Tweeten as large-scale hovering portraits at architectural scale, rarely sharing a frame. The camera also enters a surgical theatre as a witness to a liver transplant. The liver is the organ of the myth: in Aeschylus, an eagle consumes it nightly and it regenerates by dawn. Here that regeneration is literal, a fragment of tissue evolving into a complete organ. The work's question: what survives the body?
Distributed across multiple screens and a spatialised score, the installation loops without beginning or end, a continuous present in geological time. Proximity to a screen isolates one voice; distance merges many into a harmonic field. Conceived as an exhibition object from the outset, modular and built for long-term circulation, the work extends the methodology established in The Murder of Halit Yozgat and Broken Spectre into a project designed from day one to live in exhibition, accumulating institutional history with each presentation.