Roger Ballen
dal 10/11/2010 al 26/2/2011
Segnalato da
10/11/2010
Roger Ballen
Munchner Stadtmuseum - Sammlung Fotografie, Munich
The exhibition includes photos from his series Boyhood as well as previously unpublished photographs taken during the years 1969-1973. They represent early examples of Roger Ballen's fascination with the grotesque and obscure which is a recurring theme in all of his series. After completing his trip around the world, Roger Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines and in 1981 returned to Johannesburg, South Africa, to work as a geologist.
As early as the 1960’s, Roger Ballen became acquainted with the names of well-known photographers like André Kertész, Bruce Davidson and Henri Cartier-Bresson through his mother Adrienne who was working for the New York branch of the Magnum photo agency at the time. He did, however, initially study psychology at the University of Berkley in California. In 1973, he set out on a journey around the world that would last several years. His photographs from that time period were published in the 1979 book Boyhood and reflected the influence of street photography. They illustrate Roger Ballen’s interest in the critical moment, in spontaneity and in coincidence.
The exhibition includes photos from his series Boyhood as well as previously unpublished photographs taken during the years 1969-1973. They represent early examples of Roger Ballen’s fascination with the grotesque and obscure which is a recurring theme in all of his series. After completing his trip around the world, Roger Ballen enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines and in 1981 returned to Johannesburg, South Africa, to work as a geologist. During his travels throughout South Africa, he photographed the Dorps (1986), i.e., village communities where the descendants of the Boers still live today. The book Platteland, Images from Rural South Africa (1994) captures the residents of this countryside in their spartan living quarters.
In Roger Ballen’s later series Outland (2001) the subjects he portrays turn into actors who, carry out role plays bordering on the absurd. In the photo series Shadow Chamber (2005) the human being appears mostly fragmented whereas drawings and objects produced by the artist assert their place in the pictures. Rather than depicting the outer world, these photographs are reflections of the inner world, expressing a search for what is generally hidden, the subconscious. Roger Ballen continues this search in his latest works, the series Boarding House published in 2009 and the series Asylum which is exhibited at the Münchner Stadtmuseum for the very first time.
The art of Roger Ballen is impossible to forget. It goes deep. Gets at places we didn’t know were there. Maybe hoped weren't there. It makes us wild. It opens us up to those uncertain, shocking and frighteningly banal aspects of the waking dream, twitching between animal and human, the clean and the unclean, the animate and the inanimate, the lived and the imagined, the natural and the performed. So despite the fact that his early and mid-period works – stretching, say, from the late 1970s through to the 1990s - were made under the guise of the photo-documentary tradition, there was always something else going on, something much sharper, much hotter. Arguably, the dynamic is this: Ballen’s complex artistic vision transforms particular historical and social issues into private, felt, internally experienced matters.
Robert Cook
Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Image: Mimicry, 2006, Gelatin silver print 19 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (50 x 50 cm), Ed. of 10. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Press contact:
Ulla Hoering / Gabriele Meise
Tel: 089-233-22994 Fax: 089-233-25033 E-Mail: presse.stadtmuseum@muenchen.de
Opening: Thursday 11 November 2010, 7pm
Münchner Stadtmuseum / Photography Collection
St.-Jakobs-Platz 1 . D-80331 Munich
Opening hours: Tues-Sun 10am-6pm