(Pic: "Celebration" by Roger Ballen)New exhibition of photographs by Roger Ballen at Durban Art Galery.
A new exhibition of photographs by Roger Ballen titled Boarding House, offering a follow-up to the critically acclaimed Outland and Shadow Chamber has just opened at the Durban Art Gallery.
Roger Ballen’s photographs are like images from a waking dream: compelling and thought-provoking, with layers of rich details, flashes of dark humour, and an altered sense of place. Blurring the boundaries between documentary photography and art, his work is both a powerful social statement and a complex psychological study.
Boarding House is a space of transient residence, of comings and goings, of people sheltered in a place they are using for their immediate survival. Basic and fundamental, the structure is furnished with objects necessary for an elementary existence, decorated with evocative drawings, and littered throughout with animals. Remnants function there as physical symbols of events that have occurred in the space; broken pieces of a functional reality exist as the leftovers of scenarios that have been played out there. The altered sense of place of this temporary abode creates a sense of alienation, which acts as a jumping off point for the imagination to run wild.
The exhibition offers a journey of discovery in which we leave our ordinary selves behind and confront a primitive part of the human condition and its psyche. Whether the place is real or imaginary is both indecipherable and irrelevant. It is a place where Ballen’s subconscious and the viewer’s inhibitions can occupy its own universe.
Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. Since 1982 he has been living and taking photographs in South Africa. In 2001, Outland (Phaidon Press) received the Best Photography Book of the Year Award at PhotoEspaña. In 2002, Ballen won the Photographer of the Year Award at the inaugural Rencontres d’Arles Awards. Since 2002, he has had over 50 exhibitions worldwide, including one-man shows at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and Gagosian Gallery in New York. His work is represented in many museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Boarding House runs at the Durban Art Gallery until July 19. More information on 031 311 2264.
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