South Africa-based photographer Roger Ballen has drawn ire over photographing the nation’s poor, some disabled or mentally unstable, but also praise over his singular black and white photo aesthetic that tends toward the grotesque. In his latest show at Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, May 30-August 29, the exhibition “Asylum of the Birds” examines our deepest emotions through photography.Photographed in a house on the outskirts of Johannesburg between 2008 and 2013, the series shows the occupants of the house and animals coexisting in a dreamlike world, in which subjects appear to have lost all self-awareness. Dirty walls, dented cartons, and stained cloth drape the interiors, while body parts, fragments of dolls, bent clothes hangers, snakelike coils of electric cables, and animal bones make up the composition. Drawings are present in the exhibition through lines, graffiti, or marks on walls, as well as drawings on paper. These works are by Ballen, or sometimes the subjects themselves, and evoke associations such as Brassaï, Miró, Basquiat, and Dubuffet.Though Ballen’s earlier photographic pursuits were more documentary, these clearly appear as constructed and imagined scenes, giving more insight into the creative conscious of Ballen and the psyche. Images are intended as manifestations of the most submerged levels of ourselves and drawings within the scenes allow an extension of the characters present.Said Ballen: "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."The artist’s work appeals to the inscrutable quality of a dream, so that his mises-en- scène relate to universal human experiences, drawn from the collective unconscious.Roger Ballen's "Asylum of the Birds" runs May 30-August 29 at Galerie Karsten Greve Köln.
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