The 72-year-old New Yorker, who has been living in South Africa for forty years, offers a new dive into his universe, wavering between the strange and the grotesque. The photographer and artist presents this time, in this exhibition which opens next week, stagings where models with tortured faces and stuffed animals mix.
The exhibition explores the “antagonistic” relationship of man with nature, focusing on the decimated fauna in Africa, he explains in an interview with AFP. “If we look at the history of humanity, it has been nothing but destruction of nature, destruction of wildlife”.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the number of animals living in the wild on the continent has dropped by 66% since 1970.
From the black rhinoceros to the pangolin, many species are now threatened.
The exhibition starts with the “golden age” of hunting in Africa from the end of the 19th century. Moment when “the problem began”, traces Roger Ballen.
Footage of former US President Theodore Roosevelt’s Great Hunt in 1909, in which more than 11,000 animals were killed for cataloging purposes, is shown. Two child models with safari hats sit in the middle of the audience.
“Flowers and Whiskey”
Animal heads, human bones, disturbing puppets: “These are pieces here and there of the world around us as I see it”, explains the artist.
“The world is not just flowers, whiskey and love… Life is made up of positive and negative things”.
Dressed in black from head to toe, with a slender silhouette, Roger Ballen defends himself from wanting to fall into the dark and disturbing. Called “End Of The Game”, the exhibition addresses the question of man’s action on nature from an “aesthetic” and “documentary” point of view, he says.
With the aim, however, of “psychologically challenging” and leaving “a deep impression on people”, continues the artist. Leaves bordering on the weird.
Near the entrance to the room, a man in a lion’s skin, his head covered by the wild beast’s roaring jaws, holds in each hand boxes from which screaming human heads emerge.
“It’s not like looking at a cloud or something on Instagram that you immediately forget,” compares Roger Ballen. “If we manage to create a psychological impact, then we have a chance to make an impression”.
A leitmotif in the career of the photographer. His raw portraits of white South Africans with unsightly features or congenital defects, in 1994, the year when the country emerged from the yoke of apartheid organized its first democratic elections, had had a strong impact.
The exhibition is hosted at the “Inside Out Center for the Arts”. This place has just been inaugurated in a wealthy district of Johannesburg by the artist, who wants to make it a stopover for tourists crossing the megalopolis, on the safari route.
