Lucy Raven: Rounds

The American artist’s eloquent new film tracks a remarkable undoing, as the dammed Klamath River is allowed to flow again and a submerged landscape emerges from the deep

Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025. Installation view, The Curve, 9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026. © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.

Barbican Curve, London
9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026

by JOE LLOYD

Last October, sonar captured salmon swimming down the Klamath River, which flows west from Oregon into northern California. It was a long-awaited return. Once there was an abundant flow of the fish, so much so that one of the waterway’s tributaries was named for them. The local Hupa, Karuk, Klamath and Yurok peoples had relied on the fish for centuries. They were more than just sustenance. Salmon were seen as a gift from the fish’s king, who would send them as a gift each year. Annual ceremonies celebrated the arrival of the first run of fish. Catching one was a sign of good news.

This ritual was broken in the 20th century. In 1906, an irrigation canal was completed, and salmon dwindled to extinction in the Upper Klamath Basin. In subsequent decades, four hydroelectric dams were constructed, further degrading the fishing stock. Indigenous people were banned from fishing. Many came to rely on cheap, poor-quality food sold by the government. Those who protested were brutally suppressed. In 2002, at least 34,000 fish, mostly adult salmon, died due to water diversion. They were left rotting on the river’s banks. In response, the Un-Dam the Klamath movement surged. After years of congressional stalling and legal negotiations with the power company PacifiCorp, the dams were removed. It is the most significant project of its kind in US history.

Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025. Installation view, The Curve, 9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026. © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.

The American artist Lucy Raven’s new film, Murderers Bar, premiering at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery, provides a remarkable view into the removal of the lowermost dam. Displayed on a curving screen that evokes the form of a dam, it begins with an almighty boom. Well, not quite. For a start, the film is a loop, with no single starting point. But there is a clear narrative beginning. We see the dam itself, a paradigm of 20th-century infrastructure design that has become tired. It is covered in mossy green growths. Raven takes us inside, where workers in hi-vis jackets and waterproof boots prepare sticks of explosives – a reminder of the destructive reshaping of landscape for resources.

Lucy Raven: Rounds. Film still from Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery, © Lucy Raven.

The workers assemble safely on the hilly banks of the river. The camera returns to the dam. And then, just when one is lulled into a sense of security, the explosion comes. There are flames and smoke, and then, out of the conflagration, water begins to spurt from a hole in the wall. Raven then follows the progress of this water 200 miles to the Pacific Ocean. There are no captions, no explanatory narration. As we move along the course, Raven plays with perspective: we see the water rushing towards us as if we are hovering just above it. One shot begins on the hills above before dipping down back to the water, like a bird diving down to catch a fish. The shifting points of view capture the multiplicity of the river, used – and exploited – by dozens of actors, human and non-human.

The water quickly acquires a mucky brown colour as it engulfs rocks and verges. Whenever it looks as if the water might halt, more rushes inexorably forward. Viewed from above, we see the river roll down through an imposing landscape of rock verges and seemingly endless forest. Traces of human life are few. Animals are even rarer, with the exception of birds that flutter above. We see crystal-blue tributaries of water mingle with the great brown waterway, which itself eventually gains a copperish tinge. Finally, the river meets the sea: a vast, writhing abstract painting.

Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025. Installation view, The Curve, 9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026. © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.

This is the first half of the story, and Raven lets us linger for a moment. Then a compass-like unit appears on the screen, the world turns greyscale, and the arduous journey back upstream begins. This time the camera plunges underwater and zooms through, occasionally resurfacing as if for air: a salmon-eye view of the river. All sorts of things are glimpsed in the water, but we travel so quickly it is hard to make out whether they are vegetable or mineral. Finally, we reach the dam, whose overgrown surface resembles a giant assemblage of Clyfford Still paintings. Then we go behind it, where an austere new landscape has been retrieved from the deep. The salmon might be returning, but the Klamath has been for ever changed. For all the linearity of a river’s path, there is no easy way back. One shot of the film shows a gunky green substance merging with the water. The dams are gone, but the river can never truly be turned back to its pre-modern state.

Lucy Raven: Rounds. Film still from Lucy Raven, Murderers Bar, 2025, Courtesy of the Artist and Lisson Gallery, © Lucy Raven.

Murderers Bar is the final part of Raven’s The Drumfire trilogy. The first, Ready Mix (2021), tracked the production of reinforced concrete. It was followed by the two-part Demolition of a Wall (2022), which looked at the landscape in the immediate aftermath of explosive-weapons testing. Each part looks at how the American landscape has been fragmented and refashioned by humans. The foundational myths of the American west concern the taming – or plundering – of the natural world for resources, with ecosystems and indigenous humans treated as irrelevant collateral. The Manifest destiny ideology framed this process as righteous and necessary, spreading the light of Christian America to benighted natives. While this idea declined in the 20th century, the impulse to develop continued.

Murderers Bar is an eloquent response to this imperialist process and its undoing. It is named for a previous name for a settlement along the river now known as Happy Camp, allegedly after a settler called James Camp who, on arrival, declared it “the happiest day in my life”. Raven restores an older name, but still one that may have been chosen by colonising forces. The picture is further complicated by her use of technologies such as digital imaging and sonar, technologies often used in building and projects, rather than in their removal. This, too, is an infrastructure project.

Lucy Raven, Hardpan, 2025. Installation view, The Curve, 9 October 2025 – 4 January 2026. © Jo Underhill, Barbican Art Gallery.

At the Curve, the film is accompanied by a mammoth sculptural work called Hardpan (2025). This is a metal and concrete cylinder inside which sits a rapidly rotating robotic arm fitted with a too-bright light. Viewed through two windows, it whirrs and whirls in an endless dance. Its simple circularity provides a counterpoint to Murderers Bar’s problematised back and forth. Its brutal motion echoes the sort of machinery that once choked the Klamath. Before the film, the sculpture evokes a sort of industrial sublime, awe mingled with terror. Afterwards only the terror remains.