Roger Ballen
Roger Ballen spent the 1970s documenting the behavior of boys in foreign societies, yet in recent years the Johannesburg-based artist has worked as a miner and has garnered acclaim for capturing the lunacy inherent in penurious oppression. Spanning two decades, twenty black-and-white prints trace Ballen’s move from social documentary into surreal, dark tableaux that depict marginalized white men in South Africa.
In the black-and-white print, Brian with a Pet Pig, 1998 (one of the three early works that together form a teaser, just past a wall of jagged rocks at the beginning of the exhibition) only the porcine part of this pair appears lucid. The sottish man and his doppelgänger serve as a metaphor for apartheid’s dehumanizing language—which so often drew conceptual parallels between people and lower life forms—while presaging Ballen’s future fixation on animals. In this print, which could easily be mistaken for an artifact of the Great Depression, a documentarian impulse still presents itself through hints at husbandry and cult rituals, both also recorded in Ballen’s 1994 book of photographs depicting the rural and dilapidated platteland, South Africa’s flatlands.
Around the corner is a descent into madness: A cavernous gallery houses photographs of people who mirror the abnormality of their poxed environments. Seventeen pictures, made later in Ballen’s career, rely on direct flash and the staging of harrowing conditions to generate shocking scenarios in which the downtrodden becomes synonymous with the absurd. Humans morph with animals; a duck possesses an arm, a youth is caged with pigeons, and a snake conjoins with a finger. A hand is the only recognizable body part protruding from a figure veiled by an overcoat. Holding a white bird, this weathered appendage seems to further associate the manual labors performed by such an alienated population with animal functions. All human dignity has been purged from this latter image, which bears the title Headless, 2006, evincing the allegorical decapitation of those who are impoverished.
