Roger Ballen (b.1950, New York) is one of the most important photographers of his generation, known for his distinctive Ballenesque visual language that fuses photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation into unsettling psychological worlds. Having lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for most of his life, Ballen began his career documenting small towns and their isolated inhabitants. Over five decades, his practice evolved from documentary photography into what he terms “documentary fiction,” creating staged, symbolic compositions he describes as “existential psychodramas.” His work probes the subconscious and the repressed, exploring themes of chaos and order, madness, mortality, human-animal relationships, and archetypes of the psyche. 

Ballen has published over twenty-five books, directed several short films, and is represented in major international collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), MoMA the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the State Museum of Russia (Moscow), Tate Britain (London), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). In 2022, he represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale Arte and is the founder and director of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.

This landmark exhibition at CAN gallery is presented alongside Roger Ballen’s retrospective at the Benaki Museum, marking a defining moment in the artist’s fifty-year career. For the first time, it unveils his new series of color photographs, Spirits and Spaces, alongside his series of photographic negatives, Hungry Ghosts.

Although he had long rejected color photography, Ballen was unexpectedly captivated in 2016 when he received a Leica SL camera as a gift. Embracing this new tool, he began exploring the expressive possibilities of color and light, opening fresh avenues of experimentation within his distinctive Ballenesque visual language.

Both a visual revelation and a milestone in his artistic evolution, Spirits and Spaces represents a pivotal chapter in Roger Ballen’s oeuvre. It captures with striking clarity Ballen’s absurd and uncanny universe, where animals, sculptural constructions, and Art Brut-inspired drawings coexist, while human presence is reduced to shadowy forms or fragmented bodies. The scenes unfold within a claustrophobic environment of worn wooden panels clad in wallpaper, lit with austere, minimalist precision. Within this dense, tense space, Ballen conjures a world that defies logical explanation—a realm where absurdity, chaos, comedy, and tragedy coexist in fragile equilibrium. 

In parallel, in the basement of the gallery — a former SAS bunker — the artist presents a curated selection from his Hungry Ghosts series. The negative photographs in this body of work serve as gateways to a subterranean, unconscious world, where figures emerge from darkness like shadows of memory and dream. The use of negative film is not merely technical but profoundly existential: the inversion of light and dark becomes an allegory of the human condition itself, where presence emerges from absence, and the visible from the invisible. Through distorted figures, scratches, and fleeting gazes, Ballen challenges us to confront not the external world but the shadows that dwell within us—the “hungry ghosts” of consciousness.