Roger Ballen

“A photograph can confirm what we implicitly understand but cannot express. In my opinion, the best images are those for which we cannot find words.” – Roger Ballen

With roger ballen.! drawing meets photography, we turns our lens on one of contemporary photography’s most influential figures. Roger Ballen, who has lived and worked in South Africa since 1982, works across photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film. Drawing has played an especially transformative role in his work since the late 1990s, as line has moved increasingly to the foreground of his photographic language. Drawn faces, animals and ambiguous forms appear alongside wires, marks and other graphic elements across his photographs, painted-over Polaroids and large-scale drawings.

Spanning the years 1998 through 2025, this exhibition features over a hundred and twenty works, charting a course through key series such as Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, and Roger’s Rats. It also includes Spirits and Spaces, Roger Ballen’s first series in which he works extensively in color. Across these bodies of work, interior spaces, animals, fragments of the human body, doll parts, drawings and objects serve as cast members in an idiosyncratic visual theater. Roger Ballen’s connection to Art Brut is clear, alongside a deep interest in the subconscious and a visual language that bypasses academic conventions. This distinctive aesthetic has become known as the “Ballenesque.”

The fusion of line and lens takes another form in The Theatre of Apparitions. Created with Marguerite Rossouw, these ghostly figures and scenes emerged through experiments with paints, epoxies and emulsions applied to glass, inspired by figures Ballen encountered scratched into painted-over windows in an abandoned women’s prison. The resulting images existed only temporarily before being preserved through photography. With the sculpture Drawing Man, this graphic universe moves beyond the photographic frame and into physical space.

Across five decades, Roger Ballen has forged a practice that explores the deeper recesses of the psyche, where the familiar and unfamiliar, order and disorder, and the conscious and unconscious intersect. At Fotografiska Berlin, this visual world extends beyond the photographic frame: a screening room, found objects, and sculptural interventions structure the exhibition, while a site-specific installation connects the gallery space with the loft.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Roger Ballen was born in New York in 1950. After arriving in South Africa in the early 80s, he began photographing while travelling extensively, later turning his attention to the towns, and people he encountered in rural South Africa. Street scenes gradually gave way to domestic interiors, where walls, objects, wires and marks became increasingly important elements within his photographs. By the 1990s, he coined the term “documentary fiction” to describe an aesthetic that wavers between document and staging.

After the turn of the century, his photographs became increasingly complex and psychological, as the human figure began to share the frame with animals, drawings, objects and fragments of the body. Over the years, Roger Ballen expanded his scope, working increasingly across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and photography. Human figures increasingly gave way to doll parts, masks, objects, drawings, and animals.

Roger Ballen also turned to film, creating the 2012 music video I Fink You Freeky for the South African band Die Antwoord. His works are held in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

CREDITS

This exhibition was created in collaboration with museum gugging and curated by Nina Ansperger, Artistic Director, museum gugging. It was co-curated by Marie-Luise Mayer, Exhibitions Manager at Fotografiska Berlin, in collaboration with the artist.

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