Roger Ballen

Psychological Topographies of the Unconscious: The Photographic and Cinematic Work of Roger Ballen

The New York-born artist, photographer and filmmaker Roger Ballen (b. 1950), who lives in South Africa, is one of the most stylistically influential figures in contemporary photography. His works, imbued with depth psychology and situated at the intersection of documentary, theatrical staging, drawing and sculpture, constitute a distinct aesthetic that is recognised in art history under the term ‘Ballenesque’. In May 2016, the Von der Heydt-Kunsthalle in Wuppertal dedicated a comprehensive retrospective to the artist. The exhibition brought together over one hundred black-and-white photographs as well as several film works from different creative phases, offering a systematic insight into the artist’s complex oeuvre, characterised by existential and absurd motifs.

On the fringes of this museum exhibition, a film documentary featuring the artist was produced on location in Wuppertal. As part of this project, the filmmaker and director of the IKS, Ralph Goertz, met the artist for an exclusive and in-depth video interview. The video recording serves as an essential historical document, preserving Ballen’s reflections on art theory amidst his expansive visual worlds and making the methodological and philosophical foundations of his artistic practice accessible to scholarship.

The academic discourse focused primarily on the formal and conceptual transitions within his entire body of work. In the documentary, Ballen discusses the systematic shift from his early, sociologically and documentarily influenced perspective on the rural peripheries of South Africa towards a purely metaphorical, graphic-theatrical form of staging. In this context, the concept of the ‘Ballenesque’ describes a psychological method in which the human subconscious is externalised in real space through the calculated interplay of raw wall drawings, fragments of bodies, animals and ephemeral everyday objects. Furthermore, the interview addresses the growing relevance of the medium of film in his more recent work. For the artist, the moving image serves as a necessary extension to break down the static structure of photography and to analytically examine the process-oriented, kinetic dynamics of his psychological topographies.