Ben Langlands

Ben Langlands is a contemporary artist who collaborates with Nikki Bell, forming the duo Langlands & Bell.

Their artistic oeuvre spans from film and digital media projects to sculpture, installations, and full-scale architecture. Within their aesthetic framework, they explore the structures we inhabit and the interconnected networks that define them. At a broader global level, their work reflects how space is encoded and interpreted as social, political, or economic territory.

Biography of Ben Langlands

Ben Langlands was born in 1955 in London, UK. He studied fine art at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1977 to 1980. 

In 1977, he met Nikki Bell. They started collaborating in 1978. That same year they presented their first collaborative work titled "The Kitchen," which featured two adjacent kitchens—one designed by Langlands and the other by Bell.

The duo were among the young British artists featured in the Sensation exhibition in 1997, which debuted at the Royal Academy of Arts in London before traveling to Berlin and New York.

In 2002, Langlands & Bell spent two weeks in Afghanistan exploring the aftermath of twenty-first-century warfare. Their resulting body of work, exhibited as "The House of Osama Bin Laden" at the Imperial War Museum in London, was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2003 and won the BAFTA Award for Interactive Art Installation in 2004.

Langlands & Bell's largest artwork to date is the 2004 Paddington Basin Bridge, a collaboration with Atelier One (structural engineers). This impressive piece is an 8-meter high and 45-meter-long pedestrian bridge crafted from white metal and glass.

Langlands & Bell have showcased their work extensively on the global stage since the early 1980s. Their works have been included in numerous exhibitions, including "Langlands & Bell: Ideas of Utopia; Absent Artists; Ideas of Utopia" at Charleston in East Sussex (2022), "The Past is Never Dead" at Gallery 1957 in Accra (2021), "Langlands & Bell: Degrees of Truth" at Sir John Soane's Museum in London (2020), "The Aerodrome" at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (2019), and many more.  

Currently, Ben Langlands divides his time between Kent and London, UK.