Roger Ballen’s Inside Out Centre launches with new exhibition

Roger Ballen, the feted photographic artist, opens his Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Forest Town, Johannesburg, on March 28 2023 with an exhibition entitled End of the Game. Comprising various installations and a survey selection of his own photographic work from the last few decades, the exhibition is focused on Africa’s particular ecological blight — big game hunting.

The new centre, housed in a purpose-built, sleekly brutalist concrete edifice, was created and is run through Ballen’s not-for-profit foundation, established in 2008. The name ‘Inside Out’ derives from its goal to encourage aesthetic introspection, but also from the design of the building, which uses a raw concrete exterior to conceal an entrance that opens into a double-volume, split-level, naturally lit space with a central atrium and lots of clean wall space. Created by local architect Joe van Rooyen of JVR Architects, it is intended to be a landmark building for the city.

The stated goal of Ballen’s foundation is to contribute to the cultural life of Johannesburg and the continent at large by presenting exhibitions that have an Afrocentric ‘aesthetic and psychological dimension’. The centre will also act as an educational space, programming talks, panel discussions, masterclasses and presentations that reflect on the current exhibitions and other relevant topics.  

Ballen’s Inside Out Centre joins near-neighbours the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Museum and the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) in the leafy and affluent old suburb of Forest Town. All bordering the Joburg Zoo, it makes that particular stretch of Jan Smuts Avenue a fairly heavyweight artistic and intellectual nexus in the city.

The inaugural exhibition, End of the Game, deals in a characteristically Ballenesque way with the wholesale colonial destruction of wildlife in Africa through game hunting, through both an historical and artistic lens. Its title is taken from celebrity photographer Peter Beard’s exhibition of the same name in 1965, punning on the fact that ‘the game is killing the game’. The show is split in two — the upstairs space largely devoted to a relatively straightforward historical account of the wholesale mayhem caused by colonial big game hunting in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among those named and shamed are Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill, as well as American president Teddy Roosevelt. Between 1908 and 1910, Roosevelt’s sumptuously equipped hunting safari killed over 11,000 animals. As the show points out, this devastation, now mostly fuelled by poaching, remains a significant threat to many African species, including elephants, rhinos and big cats. A thousand rhinos were killed in SA alone in 2020.

Representative selections of marginalised figures from the rural areas of SA, documented in his controversial early collection Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994), combine images of gunmen and animals. Later series, mostly originally published as books, also contribute examples of Ballen’s focus on the disappearance of the human and emergence of the animal in various forms, in series like Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2009), Asylum of the Birds (2014) and Roger’s Rats (2017). Also on show are light boxes made from the Theatre of Apparitions (2016) series, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2022. In this series, Ballen and collaborator Marguerite Rossouw painted and drew ghost-like figures on the windows of a Johannesburg warehouse and photographed these creations. The exhibition concludes with some of the artist’s latest coloured photographs, dating from 2017 onwards, marking his transition into colour after 50 years of working exclusively in black-and-white.

Perhaps most difficult for the viewer to take in is the final component of the show, the various installations which accompany Ballen’s photographs. These consist of found objects collected by the artist over the last 40 years, and mostly resemble the mannequins and neglected taxidermies of a carnival sideshow of your nightmares. That, of course, is Ballen’s intention, and that of his Ballenesque aesthetic.

The exhibition is accompanied by a really well-produced catalogue, produced by the centre itself, with detailed and considered critical texts by Amanda Ballen, the Director of Programmes at the Centre. 

For further information visit www.insideoutcentreforthearts.com