The Other Mind: Roger Ballen. A Retrospective
Roger Ballen
What you are about to experience is the unsettling, poetic, and deeply psychological world of Roger Ballen – one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary photography. For over five decades, Ballen has explored the human psyche through haunting black-and-white images and, more recently, vivid colour compositions. His work blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, reality and dream, human and animal, sanity and madness.
Born in New York and based in South Africa since the 1980s, Ballen began his career documenting rural communities and marginalised individuals. But his artistic journey soon took a radical turn. He developed the now-iconic “Ballenesque” aesthetic – a surreal theatre of the absurd populated by disjointed bodies, animals, wires, dolls and primitive drawings. These elements are not props but psychological symbols, revealing the subconscious forces that shape our existence.
This retrospective, curated specifically for the Rothko Museum, presents Ballen’s evolution from stark documentary realism to intricately staged, psychologically charged compositions. Visitors will encounter works from key series such as Boyhood, Platteland, Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, and The Theatre of Apparitions, as well as newer colour photographs that expand his visual language while retaining the raw emotional power of his earlier work.
Ballen’s images are not meant to be understood – they are meant to be felt. They provoke, disturb and linger in the mind. As Ballen himself says:
“My photographs are psychological mechanisms. They reach a point in the human mind that takes them into a new space, outside the standard norms.”
This exhibition invites you to confront your own subconscious, to explore the other mind – the one we often ignore, but which Ballen fearlessly exposes.
Curated by Aivars Baranovskis
5 June – 30 August 2026
Publicity image: Roger Ballen. Puppy Between Feet. Photography. 1999
