Roger Ballen at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
by Jessica Webster
Fairly early on a Saturday morning I entered the Johannesburg Art Gallery in anticipation of Roger Ballen's latest exhibition, where the stark reality of my slight hangover did not help. I found myself giggling nervously at times, at others trying to stem the flow of bile from my gut. My first impression was: Obie Obieholzer meets the makers of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or more recently The Hills Have Eyes, a blood n' guts movie about a forgotten mining community in the Utah desert who feed maniacally on families of hapless travelers. I thought I'd managed to put my nightmares from watching the film behind me until I walked into Ballen's latest jettison of artwork.
In this series of grainy, black and white photographic prints, Ballen leaves any past pretensions - an ethnographic study of poor white South Africans living in the middle of nowhere - at the door. Instead it is more a study in morbid fascination than anything else. Here, slightly misshapen, generally decrepit-looking men, women and children pose awkwardly, sometimes comically against purposefully constructed backdrops. Scarred, pitted, smeared and bloodily splashed walls are further defaced by bits of wire, electrical cords and grimacing charcoal line-drawings. Dogs, cats and birds lie around, seemingly half-dead or expired. The combinations of old toys, plastic cartoon masks and old cardboard boxes create paraphernalia of eerie, dreadful familiarity.
Ballen has largely omitted any representations of black South Africans. Where they've been included, the sheer grotesque uncanniness of this exhibition is weakened. This is because the exhibition seems to serve an almost cathartic function, as if - yes, here lie the monsters of our past - this is the reflection and hideous embodiment of white deceit and destruction. This ambience is perhaps worrisome in light of the fact that the people cavorting in these somewhat carnivalesque photographs are hardly the benefactors of a past white supremacy. In their old fashioned, dirty clothes, they are instead a people left behind and forgotten - if it weren't for Roger Ballen. One wonders just how he built up relationships with them to the extent that they are willing to crawl under wire frames, jump on old mattresses or pull faces at the camera.
Indeed, Ballen has clearly exploited the defective, really unaesthetic (to put it kindly) condition of the people depicted. However, he seems to have done it in full awareness of the kind of statement this kind of photograph makes. Instead of whitewashing the situation, he underscores it. For this reason Ballen's show is worth seeing and particularly worth thinking about, whether it makes you laugh, vomit, or cry.
Jessica Webster is a Masters student at Wits School of Arts. She graduated from Michaelis, UCT in 2005
Opens: March 8
Closes: May 27
Johannesburg Art Gallery
Klein Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 725 3130
Email: job@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tue - Sun 10am - 5pm
