World-renowned photographer Roger Ballen’s Inside Out Centre for the Arts, which opened in 2023, is an educational and museum space for themed installations and a showcase for his own work. Now he has teamed up with architect Joevan Rooyen to build a dedicated photography museum, turning the site in the leafy, old-money Joburg suburb of Forest Town into a heavyweight global creative destination.
The same couple of blocks also house the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre and the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation, extending the area’s credentials as the city’s new — and less overtly commercial — arts and culture hub.
The Roger Ballen Centre for Photography opened last month with a groundbreaking debut exhibition that, in typically provocative Ballen style, explores the interface between AI and the future of the image, especially the photographic image.
The clean-lined, interlocking concrete cubes of the new museum house one of only a few institutions in Africa dedicated entirely to photography. It is structured as three cubes, with the main space a classic rectangular gallery, the custom-designed lighting system departing from the usual spotlighting to a more diffused approach better suited to photographic work.
The other, smaller exhibition spaces will house installation and project showcases. Ballen describes the genesis of the museum: “It’s always been my goal to create a dedicated space for photography in South Africa. I founded the Roger Ballen Foundation almost 20 years ago to support local photographers, but the missing piece was always a venue. With this centre, I hope to provide a platform for powerful photographic voices, both African and international, and to engage the public in a deeper reflection on image-making today.”
The centre launches with a typically contrarian and provocative exhibition titled “PSYCHOPOMP!”, curated by Berlin-based artist and theorist Boris Eldagsen, something of a kindred spirit to Ballen himself. Realised with the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, the exhibition explores the evolving role of AI-generated images as a mirror of the unconscious mind.
Eldagsen is an award-winning photomedia artist and philosopher whose practice blends photography, painting, theatre, and film to delve into the hidden corners of the psyche. His career spans major exhibitions and festivals across Europe, Asia, and Australia, and he is internationally recognised for igniting a global debate on AI and art when he declined the 2023 Sony World Photography Award for an AI-generated image entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician. Eldagsen refused the award on the basis that AI images and human-generated photographs belong in different aesthetic categories — a stance, and a provocation, that had him removed from the competition.
In this debut exhibition, Eldagsen stages AI imagery as “photography’s unsettling double”. The curator explains the differences between photography as we understand it and images produced by AI — what he calls, in a clever coinage, “promptography”. “As curator, I selected AI-generated images that share Roger Ballen’s psychological approach but differ significantly in method: photography translates psychology through the artist’s direct engagement with real spaces, real bodies, and real-world constraints, while promptography visualises psychological states through virtual imagination alone. Consequently, AI-generated images eliminate the direct physical relationship between artist and subject that defines photography, shifting the experience of imagemaking into the artist’s internal world. Given that AI has emerged as photography’s strongest rival, examining photography’s definition from multiple perspectives is essential. Thus, the centre becomes a space where photography is actively questioned, redefined, and understood precisely by confronting what it is not.”
The exhibition features over 20 international and local artists, including Arminda da Silva (SA), Ian Haig (Australia), Rosemberg (Spain), Infrarouge (France), and Crudguts (Brazil).
The “psychopomp” of the show’s title is derived from the Greek for those who ferry the soul into the afterlife. It is an apt metaphor for the interplay between conscious imaging and unconscious desire and imagining, brought home in dramatic fashion by the use of AI to generate aesthetic images. It is no accident that many images show reimagined and “impossible” human bodies as a result, referencing the Jungian concept of the “shadow” that might just as well be the polymorphous perversity of classical Freudianism.
The challenging nature of many of the images, and the dissociative nature of their origins, find a true aesthetic home in Ballen’s new centre, and stage what is becoming the key aesthetic debate of our time in a suitably provocative fashion.
Arminda Da Silva, South Africa:
Graphic designer and illustrator born in 1983 and based in Joburg. She holds a BA in Visual Communication Design from The Open Window (2011). Her creative practice is rooted in a lifelong fascination with colour and texture. Influenced by a childhood surrounded by art, Da Silva began collecting magazine clippings at an early age, a habit that evolved into digital-image hoarding and a deep visual curiosity. In 2022, she became a mother and, in the same year, discovered the AI tool Midjourney. It quickly became a creative outlet, an intuitive, emotionally driven space for play and exploration. Her work embraces the strange and imperfect, using AI not as a shortcut to perfection but as a tool for experimentation and expression. She creates images that feel slightly off yet strangely familiar, pieces that invite a second glance.
Alsoguppyme (aka Guppy), Malaysia:
Singapore-based artist involved in commercial design and personal visual experiments. Trained in Fine Art in Singapore, she left formal practice to make ends meet — juggling shift work and taking underpaid roles at boutique agencies. She built a solid career in the commercial world but never quite shook the feeling that something was missing — her own way of seeing, feeling, and making. That space opened up again when she encountered generated images. For the first time, applications existed that could keep pace with and supersede how her mind wandered – strange, layered, and unpredictable. Her current practice revolves around what she calls co-generated figuration — using generative AI models to produce emotionally and symbolically charged imagery, then refining them through post-work in Photoshop with tools like Magnific.
Crudguts, Brazil:
Artist with a 10-year career in the audiovisual industry as an illustrator and graphic designer, born in 1986 in Rio de Janeiro. Crudguts uses generative AI to create visual pieces that invite the viewer to question the supposed normality.
The exhibition opened to the public on 3 September and features a programme of talks on AI, ethics, and creativity, conducted by Eldagsen.
insideoutcentreforthearts.com/roger-ballen-centre-for-photography
From the September issue of Wanted, 2025
