Viewing Room # 11 - ROGER BALLEN

The World According to Roger Ballen

WILLAS contemporary has had the pleasure of working with and representing Roger Ballen since 2009, and we are very proud to announce that Roger Ballen will be one of the featured artists that will represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale Arte 2022, themed "The Milk of Dreams".

Roger Ballen's photographs span over 50 years. He has lived in Johannesburg, South Africa since 1982 and has produced over 25 monographs and his work is collected in many of the most important museums in the world. In Viewing Room #11 - Roger Ballen - we take a look at the various bodies of work, and present a careful selection from many exhibitions we created together with Mr Ballen up to this day;

• 2009 - Roger Ballen at Risör Fotofestival - Solo Exhibition

• 2010 - 7th Lane - Photography from Heaven and Hell - Group Exhibition

• 2011 - High Speed Insanity at Blomqvist Kunsthandel in Oslo - Group Exhibition

• 2011 - Fotomessen - Oslo - Group Exhibition

• 2014 - Theatre of the Absurd at Fotografiska in Stockholm - Solo Exhibition

• 2015 - Photo London - Art Fair

• 2015 - Photo Shanghai - Art Fair

• 2015 - Photo Market - Fotografiska - Art Fair

• 2016 - Look Again at WILLAS contemporary - Group Exhibition

• 2017 - BALLENESQUE at WILLAS contemporary - Solo Exhibition

• 2017 - Uncontaminated in Circus tent - Aker Brygge - One night only Multi media Solo Exhibition

• 2018 - Haute Photographie Fotografiska Stockholm, Sweden

• 2021 - Roger the Rat - at Oslo Negativ - Solo Exhibition

One of the most influential and important photographic artists of the 21st century, Roger Ballen’s photographs span over fifty years.  His strange and extreme works confront the viewer and challenge them to come with him on a journey into their own minds as he explores the deeper recesses of his own.

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950 but for over 30 years he has lived and worked in South Africa. His work as a geologist took him out into the countryside and led him to take up his camera and explore the hidden world of small South African towns. At first he explored the empty streets in the glare of the midday sun but, once he had made the step of knocking on people’s doors, he discovered a world inside these houses which was to have a profound effect on his work. These interiors with their distinctive collections of objects and the occupants within these closed worlds took his unique vision on a path from social critique to the creation of metaphors for the inner mind. After 1994 he no longer looked to the countryside for his subject matter finding it closer to home in Johannesburg.

Over the past thirty five years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In the earlier works in the exhibition his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘documentary fiction’. After 2000 the people he first discovered and documented living on the margins of South African society increasingly became a cast of actors working with Ballen in the series’ Outland (2000, revised in 2015) and Shadow Chamber (2005) collaborating to create powerful psychodramas.

The line between fantasy and reality in his subsequent series’ Boarding House (2009) and Asylum of the Birds (2014) became increasingly blurred and in these series he employed drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. There was an absence of people altogether, replaced by photographs of individuals now used as props, by doll or dummy parts or where people did appear it was as disembodied hands, feet and mouths poking disturbingly through walls and pieces of rag. The often improvised scenarios were now completed by the unpredictable behaviour of animals whose ambiguous behaviour became crucial to the overall meaning of the photographs. In this phase Ballen invented a new hybrid aesthetic, but one still rooted firmly in black and white photography.

In his artistic practice Ballen has increasingly been won over by the possibilities of integrating photography and drawing. He has expanded his repertoire and extended his visual language. By integrating drawing into his photographic and video works, the artist has not only made a lasting contribution to the field of art, but equally has made a powerful commentary about the human condition and its creative potential.

His contribution has not been limited to stills photography and Ballen has been the creator of a number of acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series’. The collaborative film I Fink You Freeky, created for the cult band Die Antwoord in 2012, has garnered over 125-million hits on YouTube. He has taken his work into the realms of sculpture and installation, at Paris’ Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2017), Australia’s Sydney College of the Arts (2016) and at the Serlachius Museum in Finland (2015) is to name but a few.  The spectacular installation at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2017, “House of the Ballenesque” was voted as one of the best exhibitions for 2017.   In 2018 at the Wiesbaden Biennale, Germany, another installation “Roger Ballen’s Bazaar/Bizarre” was created in an abandoned shopping centre.

Ballen’s series, The Theatre of Apparitions (2016), is inspired by the sight of these hand-drawn carvings on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison.

Ballen started to experiment using different spray paints on glass and then ‘drawing on’ or removing the paint with a sharp object to let natural light through. The results have been likened prehistoric cave-paintings: the black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases onto which Ballen has carved his thoughts and emotions. He also released a related animated film, Theatre of Apparitions, which has been nominated for various awards.

In September 2017 Thames & Hudson published a large volume of the collected photography with extended commentary by Ballen titled Ballenesque Roger Ballen: A Retrospective.

Halle Saint Pierre in Paris presented The World According to Roger Ballen in a solo show that took over the entire place for a full year in 2019-2020.  Thames & Hudson published the book in French and English to accompany the show. 

Surreal, refined, disturbing: Roger Ballen has made a name for himself with his special eye for what is usually considered minor or outside, yet is nevertheless profound and touching. In his hands, the documentary power of the camera merges with the ingenious power of his imagination to look into a person’s soul and get under the viewer’s skin. Elaborately produced between 2015 and 2020, his new project is called Roger the Rat. In oppressively sharp black-and-white shots, he follows the life of a creature whose body appears human, but who has the head of a rat. Picture after picture, we witness scenes that—deconstructed and wrested from everyday gestures—reveal the suppressed aspects of human existence.  

Thames & Hudson will be producing a revised up to date version of Ballenesque, Roger Ballen a Retrospective in the Spring of 2022.