Twirling Wires, 2001 © Roger Ballen

Exhibition on View:
Saturday, May 7, 2011 – Sunday, August 28, 2011

Museum Het Domein
Kapittelstraat 6, 6131 ER Sittard
T 0031-46-4513460
The Netherlands

Artist Talk & Book Signing:
Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 2:00pm
Reservations recommended

The exhibition will feature roughly 120 photos of Roger Ballen’s photos ranging from the beginning of the 1980s till today, including selections from his recent series Outland, Shadow Champer, and Boarding House. Ballen is best know for his work of animals, people, and complex visual scenes taken in his home country of South Africa. Ballen’s series and other photographs have been featured in Aperture magazine issue 201 and 173.

Roger Ballen, Fragments, 2005

South African artist Roger Ballen is known for his cryptic photographs, some of which even he doesn’t completely understand. His new collection of images, Documentary Fiction, is no different. Currently on show at the Photographer.ru Gallery in Moscow, Ballen’s exhibition focuses on the eerie ambiguity of asylums and places of discontent. With disturbing reinterpretations of still life, Ballen adds to the riddle of his photographs animate and inanimate objects. Animals, appendages, food scraps, graffiti and anything else of interest are scattered throughout the frame, often haphazardly. The works in Documentary Fiction are comprised of thousands and thousands of parts according to Ballen, but it’s up to the viewer how they should be pieced together… if they can be at all.

The new Aperture Issue 201 features an article on the same Ballen photography project, with accompanying text by Walter Guadagnini.

Roger Ballen: Documentary Fiction
On view: Thursday September 16 – Sunday November 28th, 2010

Photographer.ru Gallery
4-th Syromyatnicheskiy pereulok, 1. str. 6, Moscow
+7 (495) 228-11-70