Madness, irrationality and the absurd mark Ballen’s series of photographs, writes Danny Shorkend in his review of Roger Ballen’s exhibition The House Project at Gallery MOMO.
This exhibition focuses on the house as a metaphor for the mind, looking at both the conscious and logical as well as and in particular the sub-conscious terrain. It is the former, insofar as the artist has attempted to give some sort of linear flow to the imagery and it is certainly concerned with the latter in the sense that the viewer is submerged in a world of disconnected images, archetypal symbols and mysterious, ghostly forms.
Moreover, one gets a sense that his work teeters on the boundary of insanity, even violence and forces the mind to question the usual binaries of good and bad, order and chaos.
In terms of some semblance of order, the artist who collaborated on this project with Italian curator and critic, Didi Bozzini, and divides the exhibition into sections, as the house consists of the ground floor, the first floor and the attic. The ground floor is said to be equated with ones worldly role and character, yet it is here that one cannot quite explain why one finds oneself where one does and this is conveyed in the incredulity one feels when viewing the imagery: Figures estranged, eerie black and white photographs that are shocking, even “ugly” – yet that is the very challenge. For Ballen challenges the viewer and forces one to question the neat and “pretty” categories by which society orders, by which society in the process excludes, labels and confines. In essence, the ground floor is the beginning of the journey towards self-actualization wherein one begins to think beyond the confines of established norms.
So then the viewer is readied for the symbolic power of the images to follow. Drawings are photographed as weird, dark, sinister and dirty-looking images filter through as if he is describing the deep recesses of the mind, the cobwebs of the mind as it were. It is a place one would want to forget or not admit to, a world that is usually not shown in the glitzy, glossy sheen of the colourful world of the advert, the vacation, the promise of salvation, cleanliness and order. Instead, one is lured into a world that seems to be at once alive and dead. Juxtapositions that are haunting, drawings primitive and subversive.
Ballen also presents his video, the Asylum of the Birds, which is emphatic, powerful and compelling.
One feels sick when viewing it. Again: It is challenging as a world populated with those on the fringes of society amidst untamed birds, fluttering, been killed and eaten; masked people; rats; cave-like drawing (probably as good as any naïve artist could do) and one can’t help question whether the artist is scientifically investigating this place and perhaps using the people who occupy it or whether he is recreating it as an artistic space that augments his interest in the depth of the mind. He ends the video with the remark – in his deep, booming, even terrifying voice – that the “light comes from the dark”. I am not easily convinced here. It is true that the light is unknown without the dark, that contrast is inevitable and necessary, but there is a violent energy, a sense that death overtakes all, that there is no colour, nothing colourful.
Yet this is art, so that the darkness is a seeming darkness, a contrived world, a theatre of play and a coming to terms with primitive part of the brain, by filtering the dark in order to find light – and in fact to transform the darkness into the light, neither by rejecting it nor by indifference. In the process there is possibly a way through toward a kind of therapy, precisely through looking at these multiple images and then, finding beauty! It is a beauty that transcends the simplicity of the familiar and the contrived. It is like the bird which, untamed and unencumbered, takes flight between the heavens and earth, so these images challenge the viewer to question the seeming boundary between dream and reality, between life an death.
I strongly recommend seeing this exhibition, as one cannot help feeling moved by it. Definitely chilling. Maybe liberating.
This review by Danny Shorkend first appeared in the Cape Times
WHAT: THE HOUSE PROJECT exhibition by Roger Ballen
WHERE: Gallery MOMO, 170 Buitengracht St, Cape Town City Centre, Cape Town, 8001
WHEN: Until 28th April 2016
