Lisson Studio

Lucy Raven: Pressure & Release

From 9 October 2025, the Barbican will present a new exhibition for The Curve titled ‘Lucy Raven: Rounds’. The exhibition will present the UK premiere of Murderers Bar (2025), the final film in Raven’s The Drumfire series (2020-2025). Using aerial and underwater imaging, the camera captures a landscape in flux, following the immense release of water as it carves its own path for the first time in over 100 years. This follows 'Lucy Raven: Murderers Bar' at Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), the first major presentation of the artist's newest work, which was co-commissioned by VAG and The Vega Foundation.

On 17 September, Art 21 announced the release of ‘Lucy Raven: Pressure & Release’. This new documentary short captures the artist as she travels to Oregon and California documenting the removal of a century-old, concrete dam along the Klamath River for Murderers Bar (2025), while also considering other works in the Drumfire trilogy.

“Pressure was mounting, trying to get this dam taken down. What I really wanted to capture was the release. It wasn’t just dirt that was released,” says the artist. “It was actually a hundred years of this industrial exploitation of that region.” 

Murderers Bar (2025) unfolds against the backdrop of the largest dam removal project in North American history, a monument to 20th century industrial gigantism. Using multiple forms of aerial and underwater imaging, the camera keeps pace with the rush of the river as it gushes from its headwaters in Southern Oregon to the Sequoia Redwood Forest of Northern California, where it lets out into the Pacific Ocean. Saturated with newly mobilized sediment, the river becomes the work’s central focus, its movements, diversions, and pressures—once harnessed by hydroelectric infrastructure—now released. Murderers Bar reflects on how natural systems are wielded for power–and how they resist.

The impressive removal project is the result of decades of activism, lawsuits, testimony, and organizing led by the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, Hoopa Valley Tribe, Klamath Tribes, and the Shasta Indian Nation, undertaken alongside a massive river restoration project dedicated to rehabilitating the habitats of numerous species including the threatened Chinook and Coho salmon.

Murderers Bar refers to a colloquial name given to a site along the Klamath River where settler violence occurred; the area was later renamed Happy Camp. In the naming and shaping of the work, Raven pinpoints the violence, abstraction, and erasure that has long dictated the use and transformation of this site.

The exhibition 'Lucy Raven: Rounds' has been featured in ArtReview and ArtForum.

Art21 "Extended Play" film, "Lucy Raven: Pressure & Release." © Art21, Inc. 2025.

Credits: Director: Ian Forster. Executive Producer: Tina Kukielski. Series Producer: Ian Forster. Cinematography: Greg Bartels, Sean Hanley, Jane Macedo Yang, Michael T. Miller, Anne Misselwitz. Editor: Brian Redondo. Sound: Teresa-Esmeralda Sanchez. Colorist: Marika Litz. Sound Mix: Collin Blendell. Associate Producer: Andrea Chung. Associate Curator: Jurrell Lewis. Assistant Editors: Stephanie Cen & Michelle Hanks. Music: Blue Dot Sessions & Epidemic Sound.

Archival Footage: Dia Art Foundation & Dan Gibeau.

Artwork Courtesy: Lucy Raven & Lisson Gallery. Murderers Bar co-commissioned by Vancouver Art Gallery and The Vega Foundation.