Roger Ballen Photography

Biennale Arte 2022: Three artists to represent South Africa in Venice The artists will participate via the country’s pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2022.

Paint, collage and photography combine in Ballen’s tumultuous The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast. Italian poet Gabriele Tinti reflects on his work …

In his latest offering, the unnerving universe of Roger Ballen’s photographs grows another dark layer through the words of Italian poet Gabriele Tinti.

An abiding interest in psychology and a lifetime’s worth of experiences in difficult places have established him as a visual curator of humanity’s uncanny interior world. And now photographer Roger Ballen has designed his first opera. Unsurprisingly, it’s no straightforward fairy tale.

We try to find purpose in confusion, but … chaos dominates the human condition.

I am an outsider, live on the margin and have no place in human society. I am judged by humanity to be insane, to be feared and avoided at all costs. Thus reads an extract from Roger Ballen’s latest title, Roger the Rat. 

Photography’s king of bizarre, Roger Ballen, is taking the fairy tale opera into uncharted visual territory. SHOCK FACTOR? Die Antwoord in a still from a video by Roger Ballen. Image: Supplied Die Antwoord. Yes, that pair of purposefully misshapen artist-musicians; demented fury in their eyes, their angry faces screaming zef rhymes as they toss skeef looks at […]

Weekend Breakfast with Refiloe Mpakanyane Profiling Artist, Roger Ballen

Review by Gerhard Clausing •   Jackpot, 2016   Roger Ballen is taking us on another trip – this time viewed through the mind of an alter ego named Roger the Rat. This creature is a life-sized human-animal combo who wears the mask of a rodent and serves as the tool of Ballen’s mysterious puppetry. […]

Roger the Rat materializes at a bizarre node between installation art, method acting, and photography––all with a splash of nihilism.