PROFILE
Like Diane Arbus, Ballen photographs his subjects with a genuine affection that adds a sweetened layer to their raw authenticity. “I didn’t look at these people as extraordinary or different, I just saw them as … other human beings walking the planet, that’s all… No more… No less,” Ballen said in an email interview with Fabrik. “I liked them a lot more than the people in shopping centers pretending they’re more important and better than anybody else.” Later on in his career, the artist began experimenting with video. “I Fink U Freeky,” Ballen’s video collaboration with Die Antwoord, a South African rap-rave group, offers insight into his approach to photography. In the video, the band’s singer, Yolandi Visser, a dirty-strange, blonde siren of a performer, writhes lasciviously atop a pile of fat, furry white rats. “There’s an interesting relationship between my photographs and what Die Antwoord did,” said Ballen. “I think it’s useful to try to show how photography can be transformed through video.” A number of Ballen’s videos can be viewed on his YouTube channel. There, the film, “The Theatre of Apparitions” is described as “an animated theater of dismembered people, beasts and ghosts [that] dance, tumble, make love and tear themselves apart: A nightmarish subconscious world in black-and-white.” “The Theatre of Apparitions” has bizarre sequences that leave behind traditional filmmaking and photography, and parody high art. The images are painted, drawn, then animated in a way that might have been done during the late Middle Ages, when art, dance and music mocked sex, death and the Black Plague. Another of Ballen’s films, “Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind” is characterized in its YouTube summary as “a psychological thriller set in a zone between sanity and insanity, dream and reality,” This work plays with conscious and subconscious stories that seem familiar, yet are distinctly odd and scary. Many of the actors, plucked from real life, have grotesque faces, and missing or filed-down, pointed teeth. They inhabit surreal, derelict buildings, teeming with black and white rats. (Ballen has said he believes rats are the smartest species on the planet in relationship to their brain size.) A skinny, shirtless, filthy man is a Jungian pied piper. He gathers the rodents into a misshapen cloth rucksack that he hoists over his shoulder as he skitters through a barren, Ballenesque cityscape. Often, these ruins have the artist’s drawings sketched onto the walls. Some make sexual references, others have disembodied, primitive faces. These works shimmer with inscrutable enigmas and the offbeat metafictions of mutant fairy tales. They are foreboding territories. Strangely compelling models, posed as if their bodies have been dismembered, enjoy a playful, endear32