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Opening soon at Te Uru in Titirangi, Roger Ballen's Theatre of the Mind is a provocative collection of 75 black and white images from the last two decades, and features three videos including the award-winning music video he directed for South African rap-rave group Die Antwoord. His recent works employ drawings, painting, collage and sculptural techniques to create elaborate sets. Ballen has invented a new hybrid aesthetic in these works but one still rooted firmly in photography.

Roger Ballen is one of the most important photographers of his generation. Over the past thirty years his distinctive style of photography has evolved using a simple square format in stark and beautiful black and white. In his earlier works his connection to the tradition of documentary photography is clear but through the 1990s he developed a style he describes as ‘ballenesque’.

“It’s an aesthetic, a way of expressing myself, that seems to be separate from other art, integrating drawing, painting, sculpture and installation, through black and white photography,” says Ballen. “It reflects on the subconscious and an understanding of the human condition. It takes thousands of little relationships to get a good picture.”

Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind is conceived as five suggestive ‘theatres’. The metaphor of theatre is at work throughout Ballen’s art, though not in any simple sense. He does not act as a ‘director’. His photographs are not ‘staged’. They are accumulations of actions and time passing that are assimilated in a decisive moment. So, the term theatre is used in its widest sense here. It describes a place in which to act, and where purposeful action takes place and is played out – the dramatic theatre, yes, but also the operating theatre, the theatre of war, and so on.

Ballen’s subjects are drawn from the darker recesses of the mind; from those states of consciousness that we tend in everyday life to repress. Unlike the painter, who can build images from this psychological elsewhere from scratch, as a photographer Ballen has to find approximations of such experience out there, in the world. This realisation perhaps helps explain just why, as viewers, we are always at once intrigued, repulsed, compelled and captivated in equal measure.

Ballen says “Since my early youth, I have been obsessed with outsider art whether it was created by the mentally challenged, criminals or graffiti artists. At the same time, the issue of insanity versus what society refers to as normality has been a debate in my own mind for decades.”

Curated by Colin Rhodes notes that Ballen “produces visual reports of psychological realities. His photographs are emphatically engaged objects without critical distance. Though they are exquisitely constructed as form, viewers are dragged into them, so to speak. They are an encounter.” An accompanying book, featuring an important essay on the artist and high quality reproductions of his work, is also available for purchase in the gallery shop.

This exhibition was developed by Colin Rhodes at the University of Sydney and toured by Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery in partnership with Tauranga Art Gallery. It is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography 2017 programme.

27 May – 20 August 2017
Opening Saturday 27 May, 4pm