S Beak house
Ballen’s new vision is a bird-ridden riddle — and he doesn’t know the answer, he tells
INCE his last book, 2010’s Boarding House, Roger Ballen has increased his visibility massively — thanks to his collaboration with Die Antwoord on a music video seen 44 million times on YouTube, which also spawned a book and an exhibition.
His new book, Asylum of the Birds, is accompanied by a video in which we watch him make his way to the asylum of the title, a place supposedly on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It is filled with birds, animals, mechanical objects and detritus curled around the bodies of the strange human characters living within its flimsy walls, on the distant edges of society.
In a voiceover, Ballen croaks like a sort of dark hermit inventor coming down from his gothic castle in search of objects from witchdoctor markets, pawn shops and scrapyards which he can use to make his photographs “or give to those in need”.
For the first time, we get a glimpse into the process by which Ballen makes his photos — posing his subjects in masks, or holding birds against backdrops of dark drawings harking back to cave art and the scribbles of a nursery school art class gone wrong.
Like the boarding-house setting of his last series, this asylum may or may not be an actual place. Ballen will never tell you, and with his work moving further and further into dark surrealism, that information might not be relevant.
He’s an artist passionate about what he does — deeply concerned with existential problems, and possessed of a quiet, sharp sense of humour.
Ballen says he is happy to “really mix people’s minds up”.
“It’s all ambiguous,” he says. “Is this place real, are they actors or are they real? The reality is the video, the reality is the pictures. It’s all in your head — you’re just trying to get away from the picture. You’ll never really know what the people [in the asylum] think about my work. You’ll never have any idea what I do in this place. So don’t even think about it — you’ll never know and I’ll never tell you and I might not even be able to tell you,” he says with a mischievous glint in his eye.
The series is the culmination of Ballen’s long interest in the metaphorical and symbolic power of birds, a species he describes as “linking the heavens to the earth”. Whatever it is in reality, the asylum can be seen as Ballen’s twisted, macabre reimagining of a studio — a space in which all the elements necessary for the creation of his sometimes nightmarish, primal and often humorously absurd images are brought together. Ballen enters it with his Rollei 6x6 film camera, searching for the moments that will make up his pictures.
Asylum of the Birds has continuities with his work of the past decade, but also pushes Ballen’s eye forward to new levels of psychologically disarming, existential exploration. His early work on small South African towns and their inhabitants has been replaced by interior landscapes: grey mind maps of the surreal and the grotesque, hermetically contained and steadfastly rejecting any signs of the world outside them.
The birds are richly suggestive — marking the asylum as both a place of refuge and a place of madness and chaos. They are sometimes spectators, at other times they are participants in the action.
At all times Ballen is adamant that this is a tour of the space “as created by Roger Ballen, because anyone else going into the same place would not come out with those same pictures”.
While his imagery is often described in relation to dreams and the subconscious, Ballen doesn’t wake up in the night after having a nightmare and scribble down what he recalls.
“Even though I have 64 years of experience on this planet that’s in this head of mine, I can’t really predict how the visual relationships will occur in space,” he says. “In a great deal of the photographs, the picture is tied together through a microsecond, and this microsecond is impossible to predict.”
Ballen feels that the emphasis on socio-political themes in the discourse around South African photography meant that for years he
‘I’m basically trying to resolve my life through these pictures’
was “pigeonholed as this foreigner — which I’m not, I’m a South African citizen — this foreigner running around the country taking pictures of strange, poor people”.
Now, thanks to his more recent work and the popularity of the Die Antwoord video, Ballen has garnered a new, younger generation of enthusiasts who “don’t relate back to what I did in the early days [in work such as Dorps and Platteland] and in fact a lot of them might not even have been born at the time”.
While he travels the world talking about his work — this month he visited Russia — he does this in a lecture which he prepares as a type of performance art. It’s an extension of his work that he sees as just as separate as the videos he has made, but not unconnected to his photography.
Ballen’s artistic concerns have always been psychological rather than social or political. “I am basically trying to resolve my life through these pictures. These are fundamentally existentially related pictures. Period. They just come out of my head and I don’t do them for other people or an audience.
“I’ve been doing photography this way my whole life and it’s always been a passion, not a profession. I really just do it out of my own instinct and that’s the way I want to keep it. At 64 I don’t think there’s any chance that it will ever change.”
Increasingly, the photographs have incorporated elements of drawing, painting and theatre within their shallow, square, carefully focused black and white frames — glimpses into the mind of their creator that never fail to affect the viewer. While Ballen acknowledges that his images “are hard to make sense of and people find it hard to vocalise what they’re about”, he hopes that they, ultimately, “have that type of intensity that stays in people’s heads, and that’s important”.
He is also keen to point out that while his work is often described as dark, tortured, macabre, there is a blackly comic element that reflects the absurdity of life in a way that Beckett and Kafka might have appreciated.
“If you look into your own life intensely you see that what you’re doing is basically absurd and you can’t get away from that,” he says.
That’s a sensibility appreciated by the Swedes, who are flocking to a retrospective show of Ballen’s work in Stockholm titled Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Absurd. Whether you live on the dark northern edge of the world, or the sunny plateaus of Ballen’s homeland, the inner world remains dark, strange and funny. LS