Lundi 01 Juin 2015 11:19:48 par Laure Chastant dans Expositions

Galerie Karsten Greve is pleased to present a comprehensive solo exhibition of works by the photographer Roger Ballen, who was born in New York in 1950, but has lived in South Africa for more than 30 years. The show focuses on his most recent series, entitled Asylum of the Birds.

© Roger Ballen

 

These photographs are taken mostly between 2008 and 2013 and capture dreamlike, nightmarish scenarios of complex symbolism. The underlying, often improvised mises-en-scène were all staged in a house on the edge of Johannesburg, using both the occupants and the animals that surrounded them as protagonists. The dirty walls, dented cartons and stained cloth drapes of the desolate interiors form the backdrop to actions that are largely performed by birds. Known since Antiquity as a symbol of the soul, the bird is deployed by Ballen too in its embodiment of an unrestrained urge to freedom in order to depict the unconscious. The imponderable unease and surprise that go hand in hand with this, the element of suddenness and uncontrollability that lies in the continuous movement, enhances the unreal effect of the stage-like arrangements, in which there is always an immanent psychological element. Cryptic drawings of Ballen himself or his subjects appear as codes for the incomprehensible and unpredictable, enhancing the tension.

© Roger Ballen

In Ballen’s creative understanding of himself, the image or the idea is already present in the unconscious and cannot be traced to any origin. On a practical level, the artist, starting out from an object, a person or a casual situation, is concerned to produce a chain of relationships and thus some sort of order, a rational structure between heterogeneous elements. The pictures that we actually have are a result of numerous decisions, like the countless strokes of the brush in a painting or the precise choice of words in a poem. Ballen sees himself as ‘an organizer – organizing visual chaos into coherency.’ While the composition, the captured image, represents a commentary on the contradictions and fragility of the human condition, it cannot be given any unambiguous interpretation. Thus Ballen states: ‘My pictures do not inform, they are coherent commentaries on the chaos of an incomprehensible world … If I could determine the meaning of the pictures, they would be nothing but mere photographs.’

© Roger Ballen

Ballen therefore devotes himself to the image in its enigmatic quality of dream, vision, hallucination or fantasy, so that his scenarios, as symbols, point beyond themselves and towards archetypal forms that relate to universal human experiences and are carved into the collective unconscious. Ballen’s private mythology derives from an existential need to challenge his own puzzling identity. Unimpressed by the distinction between reality and imagination, his photographs transcend pure (documentary) photography and generate highly charged pictorial worlds that undermine the boundaries between fiction and documentation, dream and reality, delusion and objectivity.

© Roger Ballen