World-renowned Photographer Roger Ballen’s “Roger the Rat” Virtual Exhibition Opens in the Baroque Gallery.

 

The classic world of black and white conceptual photography meets the cutting-edge realm of technology as the Baroque Gallery unveils the immersive “Roger the Rat” exhibition featuring the visionary works by Roger Ballen. Hailing from South Africa, Ballen has left an indelible mark on the art world with his distinctive style, and the Baroque Gallery shows this unique aesthetic from a new angle.

 

Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen is an internationally acclaimed artist foremost celebrated for his thought-provoking blend of documentary and surreal photography. With a career spanning five decades and counting, his artistic journey has been one of constant evolution and innovation. It began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Ballen himself describes his works as existential psychodramas that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. Called “Ballenesque”, the style of his documentary fiction has been said to reference the artistic genres of absurdist theatre, outsider art, art brut, naivism, photographic surrealism, and the photographic grotesque.

Baroque Gallery: Redefining the Art Exhibiting Experience

Baroque is a virtual platform for art exhibitions and sales. Founded in Ukraine by Roman Zhyvytsia and Tony Granovsky, it stands at the forefront of reimagining how art is encountered. The innovative fusion of Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies transports art enthusiasts into a realm where art is represented in an immersive, focused manner instead of the “flat scrolling” social media format. All of that is accessible through a free mobile app without using bulky helmets. Baroque Gallery’s mission extends to supporting contemporary artists, particularly during challenging times such as the ongoing war in Ukraine.

 

“Roger the Rat”: Virtual Extension

The collaboration between Roger Ballen’s inimitable style and the Baroque Gallery’s pioneering technology resulted in a virtual extension of the enigmatic “Roger the Rat” movie. Delving into themes of isolation, transformation, and the juxtaposition of human and animal worlds is now available for experience from the POV of the project antagonist. The virtual exhibition space is inspired by the hovel where Roger the Rat lived, providing a unique context that enhances the viewer’s engagement with the photography series. Each photograph is available for purchase on request as a signed limited print. Potential buyers are also welcome to fit the pictures on their walls before requesting a purchase. Tapping on any image activates an Augmented Reality “see in your room” feature.

Exhibition Details

• Exhibition Opens: 07 September 2023
• Location: Baroque Gallery Mobile App:
  • iOS: https://apps.apple.com/ua/app/baroque-gallery/id1583807961
  • Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.QWERTY.BaroqueGallery

 

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ROGER BALLEN – ENIGMA

FROM SEPTEMBER 22 TO NOVEMBER 18, 2023

OPENING ON SEPTEMBER 21 FROM 6 TO 9 PM

CURATORS: FRANÇOISE MORIN ET PHILIPPE SÉCLIER

 

Roger Ballen, Closed Eye, 1997

© Roger Ballen / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

 

Les Douches la Galerie is pleased to present, for the first time this Fall, a solo show by Roger Ballen, including his early series from the 80s and 90s. The South African photographer has been exploring the twists and turns of his subconscious for over forty years, creating stagings which invoke the themes of marginality, strangeness, the relationship between the human and animal worlds.

 

Enigma

INTERVIEW

 

You were born in New York and studied psychology at the University of Berkeley, California. How did this training, and the interest you already had in the question of the margins – social and mental – cement the foundation of your work?

During the summer of 1972 I took a theatre course at Berkeley. It was taught by a Professor Oliver, an inspiring academic who introduced me to the theatre of the absurd and such playwrights as Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco. For nearly a month I read a play every day. This one-month course gave me my understanding of the theatre and would have an impact on my work for the next few decades. Also during the summer of 1972, I took a course in film-making in San Francisco. After completing the course, I decided to direct my first film, Ill Wind (1972), influenced by my studies of the theatre. The central actor in the film was Larry LePaule, a fellow classmate. Larry was a natural, slotting into the character that dominated my script. He had a habit of breaking into a Hitler oration and had a love affair with a German girl. In August 1972, with the script for Ill Wind completed, I began a month-long shoot with Larry. The film documents a Beckett-like character as he walks from place to place, going from nowhere to nowhere, leading a life of habit and rootlessness. The end of the film repeats the narrative of the beginning. I did not watch it again until 2014, when by chance I remembered that I had stored it in a safety-deposit box at a Johannesburg bank. The inspiration for the character of Stan in my film Outland (2015) can be traced back to Ill Wind. Certainly, it has become clear to me that my interest in outsiders, the marginalized, absurdity, extends back to my early youth, and not the point at which I began photographing in the small towns of South Africa in 1982.

 

You began your career as a geologist. How has this informed your approach to photography?

In 1982 I found myself in South Africa working in mineral exploration, travelling across vast expanses of the countryside. But while my profession provided me with a living, there were questions about my existence that it did not begin to answer. I still needed to use the camera to excavate layers of my inner life. In common with my work, peering below the earth’s surface for a hidden treasure, I began to do the same with the people and places I photographed, trying to pierce their outer layer to reveal their elemental selves.

 

You traveled to many countries, including a round-the-world trip, before settling in Johannesburg, where you lived since 1982. What attracted you to South Africa? Your very first series taken in this country, Dorps, which will be exhibited at Galerie Les Douches, initially shows photos taken outdoors. What was your creative process at that time?

Up to the time I started photographing in the dorps, my camera of choice had been the more portable, less visible 35 mm. In the dorps, however, it gave way to the 6 x 6 cm Rolleiflex I had purchased in 1981. The square format of the Rollei fitted the greater stillness, the more classical and calculated composition, of my new images. Its size meant a slower, more deliberate approach, a more consciously acknowledged relationship with my subject. As I looked through the camera touching my stomach, I felt I was expressing my deeper self. The square was a perfect form, in which every side was of equal importance, equally balanced.

In addition, the images became more frontal. The wall was paramount; it was not background, but articulated surface, identified with the picture plane. On the smudged surfaces could be found wires, photographs hung in an uneven, incoherent way, children’s drawings, grease and dirt stains. Like a painter, the ‘living wall’ became my canvas. In fact, if many of the walls I photographed could be transported intact to a museum, they might be labelled works of art. At the same time as entering the interior spaces of people’s houses, I photographed the so-called outside world for the last time in my career. In the sunbaked landscape, images of doorways, verandas, cafés and pillars were captured up to the end of the Dorps project in 1986. Many of these buildings incorporate features of Victorian Cape architecture, but the essence of the style is best summed up in the Afrikaans expression ‘’n Boer maak altyd ’n plan’ (the countryman always has a plan). In other words, buildings were adapted to meet the needs of the owners and are an expression of function and personality.

 

 

What was it that suddenly led you to photograph interiors and meet people who were for the most part recluses, or at least struggling to cope with society?

For some time, I wondered what it was about the dilapidated, broken, un-monumental architecture that so attracted me. It was an aesthetic that I identified with, and which left a permanent mark on my work. Like the broken granite boulders that I often came across in my professional life, this element that I began photographing was a metaphor for the fact that no matter how hard we try, we will be defeated by time.

Perhaps my connection with outsiders stems from my counter cultural upbringing and interest in the theories of R. D. Laing. The concepts of ‘normality’ and ‘insanity’ were crucial to his teaching, and when I ended up in the small towns of South African in the 1980s, I felt compelled to find out what ‘insanity’ meant for myself. One could say that insanity is the result of an unbridled subconscious; that insanity is the id. By making contact with the outsiders of these towns and expressing my inner psyche through the camera, I was in fact expressing my own id. Being in touch with your own so-called insanity could be thought of as a creative experience. For me, insanity, while being seen as a threat to Western society – to any society – became a source of knowledge.

 

When did you start intervening in the walls you photographed, and why?

The Outland period might be labelled the ‘Wire Period’. While the first wire photographs appeared in Dorps, most particularly the Outland project saw a proliferation of wire-related imagery. I drew with wire, sometimes linking the various formal elements in the image with straight lines, curves, or realistic figures. The wires provided me with a formal tool for integrating the various elements in the photograph. In painting, the line of a wire might simply be considered a line. But in photography, one is faced with the issue that a wire is more than that; it is part of the physical space. I am often asked what the wires in my photographs mean. My response is: look around, turn your head; wires are everywhere. They surround you, infiltrate your life. Their meaning is obvious…

The concept of using drawing in my photographs evolved initially as a result of photographing subjects against walls in homes saturated with their lines, marks and drawings – in other words, from street photography, from ‘real life’. As time progressed, I began to interact with my subjects and sometimes asked them to make drawings on the wall. I then made photographs integrating what they produced with other aspects within the frame of the camera. The drawings may not have been on canvas, but they were still works of art of a kind – direct links to the people who made them.

 

Children’s Bedroom Wall, 2000

 

The animal world also features prominently in your work. What role does it play in your imagination? Is it linked to your childhood? Or to your move to an African country?

A central challenge in my career has been to locate the animal in the human being and the human being in the animal. Where did this obsession with animals come from? Perhaps it was chirping that I heard in 1950 as I lay in my mother’s womb. As a child, I was baffled by the fact that birds could fly while

 

I was stuck on the ground. I thought of them exclusively as creatures of the heavens. My personal belief is that the relationship between animals and humans is essentially adversarial and exploitative. Most societies try to deny this fact, but it is clear to me that the destruction of the natural world continues unabated. In the years I spent photographing Asylum of the Birds, I became more and more convinced that human nature is the ultimate culprit, responsible for the worst of all holocausts. The links that bind us to the planet are tangled and broken. What terrible things do the birds see as they look down from the sky? It is becoming difficult for them to find nests to return to.

 

Display, 2006

 

What do you think is the definition of strangeness in your work?

I best way to describe what is strange in my work is the word enigma. In short, I do not have a lucid explanation for this part of my work. Many of the elements in my photographs are beyond my conscious mind; it might be years before I come to a conclusion about them. These are the images I am most inspired by, the ones I do not understand.

 

Skeletal, 2005

 

Little by little, figuration has given way to a form of abstraction in your photos, which have thus become paintings. How did this gradual shift come about?

The process of creating the Ballenesque aesthetic happened gradually, layer by layer over decades. One can only progress in one’s work by focusing on the images one has taken and building on the results.

 

Are you aware of having broken the photographic codes of fine art photography?

It is one of the most gratifying comments that an artist can receive that his work is recognizable in the media that one has worked in. Given the fact that billions, maybe trillions of photographs have been taken over the past decades it is a real complement to be recognized as someone who has contributed in a meaningful way to one’s field of endeavour.

 

You have just set up your own foundation in Johannesburg. Why have you done this, and what are your ambitions?

The center opened in March in Forest Town in South Africa and the first show is called The End of the Game. It deals with destruction; it’s part documentary, partly Roger Ballen. It’s documentary in the sense that we have old photos, guns, bullets, and diaries from around the 19th century when the first white people came to Africa. This was the beginning of the destruction of wildlife. The other part of the exhibition consists of my work: In my photos and installations which deal with this topic in a more abstract way. The exhibition has a psychological impact and grapples with the problems of humanity and its relationship to nature. It will stay here for a while, I don’t want to change it for long.

So far, we have had a great response from many people who have never been to a museum before. I think 90% of the population here has never visited a museum or a gallery so if they come here, they are really amazed.

The Inside Out Centre for the Arts has four main pillars. First, it has to be related to the African continent. Second, it has to have a psychological impact. Third, it has to directly or indirectly do something with “the Ballenesque”. Lastly, it must have some relevance to the community here.

 

Interview by Philippe Séclier

 

ABOUT

Born in the US and based in Johannesburg, South Africa, Roger Ballen is one of the most important photographers of his generation. He has published over 25 books internationally and has collections in the most prominent museums in the world. In 2022 Thames and Hudson published his book Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: – A Retrospective, a major survey of his collected works.

His oeuvre, which spans five decades, began with the documentary photography field but evolved into the creation of distinctive fictionalized realms that also integrate the mediums of film, installation, theatre, sculpture, painting and drawing. Ballen describes his works as “existential psychodramas” that touch the subconscious mind and evoke the underbelly of the human condition. They aim to break through the repressed thoughts and feelings by engaging him in themes of chaos and order, madness or unruly states of being, the human relationship to the animal world, life and death, universal archetypes of the psyche and experiences of otherness.

Through his unique, complex visual language, and universal and profound themes, the artist has made a lasting contribution to the field of art. Ballen has also been the creator of several acclaimed and exhibited short films that dovetail with his photographic series. In 2022, he was one of the artists that represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale of Art.

He is also the founder and executive director of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg, which opened to the public in March 2023. The Centre aims to promote an awareness of African related issues through exhibitions and educational programmes. Its first show, entitled End of the Game, explores the decimation of wildlife in Africa both through historical artifacts and Ballen’s photographs and installations.

 

Inside Out Centre for the Arts  https://insideoutcentreforthearts.com/

 

Les Douches la Galerie 5, rue Legouvé 75010 Paris lesdoucheslagalerie.com

Contact : Françoise Morin

+33 1 78 94 03 00

contact@lesdoucheslagalerie.com

 

Wednesday to Saturday, from 2 to 7 pm

The gallery will be closed from July 30rd to August 21st, 2023

Renowned artist Roger Ballen’s visionary perspective is unveiled in the retrospective exhibition “The World According to Roger Ballen” at Fotografiska Tallinn.

 

Show Off, 2000

 

Tallinn, Estonia – October 13, 2023 – In a mesmerising revelation of artistry and enigma, Fotografiska Tallinn presents a retrospective exhibition of the world-renowned photographer and artist, Roger Ballen. The exhibition, aptly titled “The World According to Roger Ballen,” invites art enthusiasts, connoisseurs, and the curious to explore the depths of Ballen’s visionary work. The exhibition will open its doors to the public on October 13, 2023, promising an immersive journey into the captivating mind of Roger Ballen.

Roger Ballen, a photographic legend who has made his artistic home in Johannesburg, South Africa, has long been celebrated for his unique and thought-provoking approach to photography. Ballen’s camera lens leads viewers into the subconscious mind, revealing the underbelly of the human condition. This retrospective exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Parisian gallery Halle Saint-Pierre, offers a rare opportunity to witness the evolution of Ballen’s work over five decades. It showcases the transformation of a photographer into an artist who has redefined the boundaries of photography. This exhibition represents a nearly two-decade collaboration between the artist and his artistic director, Marguerite Rossouw, who has made a profound contribution to this exhibition and the development of Roger Ballen’s aesthetic.

“The pictures bring up things that people don’t want to see, that make them look in the mirror of the self they try to avoid. They call that ‘disturbing’ – it is the shadow side.”

Discussion, 2018

 

Visitors will step into an otherworldly ‘Ballenesque’ realm, where Ballen’s photographic masterpieces converge to create a powerful, immersive and transformative experience.

Roger Ballen’s artistic odyssey began over half a century ago, alongside his career as a geologist. His transformative move to South Africa, in 1982, marked a pivotal moment in his photographic journey. Initially, Ballen embarked on a path of documenting remote regions and marginalised white South Africans at the end of the Apartheid era in stark black and white.

From 1995, Ballen’s work evolved into a provocative fusion of reality and imagination. Well-known publications, including “Outland”, “Boarding House”, “Asylum of the Birds”, and “The Theatre of Apparitions”, transcend the confines of traditional documentary photography and incorporate painting, drawing, sculpture and film. His distinctive ‘Ballenesque’ style features ‘outsiders’, animals, found objects, wires, and childlike marks that cultivate a surreal Theatre of the Absurd.

 

“We are extremely pleased for the opportunity to present Ballen’s work in Estonia. This exhibition takes us all on a captivating voyage, where the boundaries of reality blur, and viewers are left questioning what is ‘real’. Maarja Loorents, the founder and Director of the Exhibitions of Fotografiska Tallinn, remarks that “Ballen encourages us to take a look inside and become friends with the depths of our psyche, not be frightened by what we might find once we dig too deep.”

The exhibition will open to the public at Fotografiska Tallinn on the 13th of October and will run until January 14, 2024.