Credits:
Executive Producer: Roger Ballen
Directed/filmed/edited: Ben Jay Crossman
Writers: Roger Ballen, Ben Jay Crossman
Sound Design: Darryl Torr
Grade by Pudding: Nicolas Apostoli, Ciretta Frezza
Motion Graphics by BFX: Shaun Froneman, Hein Schlebusch
Special Thanks: Wilma Smit, Marguerite Rossouw, Simone Stiglingh
Cast: Stan, Dirkie, Dirk, Stefanus

Roger Ballen in our ‘Best Of’ Ten Years one small seed

Watch Roger Ballen’s “Outland” & Find out more about his work with Die Antwoord

Making use of our digital magazine features, we have been able to breathe new life to previous print content – and everything has truly come together, just how we always envisioned! Please take your time to go through this magazine (all at once or a little bit each day) as a lot of work went into producing every edition and every page, since we first launched in 2005. This issue is a superlative balance of content, comprising of traditional and contemporary art, photography, fashion editorials, exclusive interviews, videos, feature articles, music, and the best of one small seed TV.
 
So, without further ado…
 

 
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The second solo exhibition of Roger Ballen, including stills from the ‘I Fink U Freeky’ music video he directed and work from the Shadow Chamber series, which inspired Ninja and Yo-landi to launch Die Antwoord, opened on September 18th.

image: david plenderleith

It seems New York-born photographer Roger Ballen always had an interest in outcasts. This is most famously proven by a photograph of the mentally and physically disabled twins Dresi and Casie. He is also known to build up an intimate relationship with his subjects. Given his background and style, it seems that there was no option but to collaborate with Die Antwoord, who he has known for seven or eight years.

image: killingbirdswithstones.com

Although Ballen says he didn’t listen to ‘I Fink U Freeky’ beforehand, the Zef duo’s provocative nature is perfectly reproduced through his lens. “It is what’s out there,” the renowned photographer emphasises at the opening of the exhibition.

Created as an artistic documentation of what exists as opposed to achieving a specific audience response, some stills stand out more than others. One image, for example, shows Yo-landi in a bath caressing a duck beneath a drawing of naked mixed-sex humanistic animals. The picture exemplifies how individual themes can be read into the still allowing it to confidently stand alone.

image: burnmagazine.org

A hint to the animal in us, perhaps? Nonetheless, its composition shows that there can be beauty in the obscure regardless of artistic intention. The exhibition at Erdmann Contemporary & The Photographer’s Gallery runs until 27 October and prints go for $5000 – $6000.

In issue 22 we interviewed Roger Ballen see the article here.

In November 2010, one small seed TV also met up with the Photographer for an enlightening one-on-one, watch the interview here.

Words: Christine Hogg

Images: David Plenderleith, killingbirdswithstones.com, burnmagazine.org

one small seed: Congratulations on your first solo exhibition at the Rooke Gallery in Johannesburg. How did this come about?

Stefan Krynauw: My work was seen by Roelof van Wyk. He then became my mentor and patron. Gavin Rooke, the owner of the gallery saw the work via van Wyk. And they decided to give me an exhibition. I worked in Oyster Bay for three months and then at Rooke Gallery, two months prior to the exhibition.

How was your work received by the public?

People seemed positive at the opening, but you never know.

So tell me, who is Stefan Krynauw, and why should we care about your work?

He enjoys painting; hopefully you will enjoy looking at it.

What are you trying to achieve through your work? What’s it all about?

I want to find different ways of extracting emotion out of chosen source material.

Your work is very conceptual, what is the process you go through to create your work?

My work is more personal than conceptual. I work from various sources while painting. I make use of newspaper clippings etcetera. Some of my reference, photographed by van Wyk was exhibited with the paintings. The relationship between the reference and the paintings can then be seen. I rework the paintings constantly.

You started out studying drama, even playing Jesus in the Lady Grey Passion Play, and within 12 months you have become a successful artist with a solo exhibition. What led to the departure?

I couldn’t see myself practicing as an actor. I’ve always made drawings and doodles, mostly on texts while in rehearsals. I made drawings for a play 4.48. Psychosis. I couldn’t stop after that.

How has your background in acting influenced your art?

It made me trust my instincts. I work intuitively as a result of studying Drama. I plan to combine the two at a later stage.

What happened when you picked up a paintbrush for the first time? What did you paint?

It’s difficult to remember, but in grade 1,I painted a car from the side, I made the surrounding sky, grass and road blue. The teacher looked at the painting and started shouting at me.

Let’s face it; all creatives have strange habits, hobbies and creative tweaks. What is your strangest hobby, ritual or creative tweak?

Reading “Die Huisgenoot.”

That’s a rather, um, unique creative tweak. So, what is the craziest thing you have ever done?

I haven’t done a lot of crazy things, but while I was in primary school I stole people’s mail and rewrote the amounts they owe the bank (in crayon). I then closed the mail and put it back in their mailboxes. It’s rather stupid, but I thought it was crazy at the time.

Keep an eye on this upcoming South African artist, and be sure to take a look at Stefan’s exhibition, Portrait of a Painter, running from 5 May to 24 June at the Rooke Gallery in Johannesburg. But don’t despair, if you miss it go down to the Johannesburg Art Fair happening in September to catch is new body of work.

Situated in the city of Niterói in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, MAC is one of the city’s most prominent landmarks due to its majestic modernist design. The saucer-shaped UFO-inspired structure is set on a cliffside, at the bottom of which is a beach.

The exhibition, entitled RECONSTRUCTIONS – CONTEMPORARY ART FROM SOUTH AFRICA, features post-apartheid South African artwork, by a range of artists from the globally acclaimed to the emerging, all of whose work is seen to subvert or challenge sociopolitical and cultural representations, creating new spatio-temporal relations.

Reconstructions features the work of David Goldblatt, Diana Hyslop, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Kagiso Pat Mautloa, Lawrence Lemaoana, Lerato Shadi, Mary Sibande, Roger Ballen, Sam Nhlengethwa, Santu Mofokeng, Thenjiwe Nkosi, Tracey Rose and William Kentridge.

According to the curator, Daniella Géo:

[Their work is] informed by collage, aesthetic and logic, and based on repetition – whether through appropriation and re-contextualization, through the accumulation or the use of series, of reenactments or montages, of embroidery and sewing, of assemblage or collage itself, of deconstructing to reconstruct – the artworks that are exhibited here, through the artistic gestures invested in them, do not only encourage us to inquire about their genesis but also signal themselves as reconstructions..

'Her Majesty, Queen Sophie' by Mary Sibande

Work on the exhibition include’s Sibande’s ‘Her Majesty, Queen Sophie’ (2010) exhibited on a billboard-size poster, photographs from Ballen’s Boarding House (2009) and Kentridge’s renowned animated short film Felix in Exile (1994).

The exhibition is notable as an unprecedented international profile on contemporary South African art, and one which is drawing invaluable attention to the South African art world, giving it long overdue recognition for its value as a worldclass creative industry.

Géo explains the relevance she finds in contemporary South African art, motivating the exhibition:

Twenty-one years after the announcement of the re-democratizing of South Africa, in February 1990, the artistic production of the country has not permitted that the much-demanded end of apartheid would lead to a crisis of creation, as some critics had feared.

If South African art no longer is in the service of the struggle against the segregationist regime, it has sustained the dynamism of the artistic strategies by expanding its aesthetic, formal and operational models as of its massive internationalization and the fostering of domestic infrastructure. At the same time, the remaining sociocultural contradictions and the repositioning, still underway, of distinct identities, have preserved the need for questioning that goes beyond the formal aspects of art.

With 11 official languages and comprised of different ethnic groups, including tribal societies, this young democracy is seeking to adjust itself to its plurality and to reduce the gaps that had been amplified by apartheid. For their part, the visual arts have confirmed themselves as a platform of fundamental reflection, by which a moving present, formed of times past and in constant evolution – is put into question.

In the midst of the multiplicity that is common in contemporary practice, as if responding to the indispensability to reorganize memories, revise concepts, reestablish paths and reconstitute uniqueness, the notion of (re)construction seems to be prevailing in the work processes and the thought systems of very different authors.

'Scavenging' (2004) from Boarding House by Roger Ballen

After the very successful FIFA World Cup putting South Africa on the map as a legitimate global player, and being in the upward climb out of worldwide recession, it seems the country is finally feeling the effects of its long struggle.

Reconstructions runs from 19 March to 15 May 2011.

Exhibition information courtesy of MAC. Architecture images courtesy of Unusual Architecture.

‘This crazy life
This crazy world
We’re living in is magical’

(Goldfrapp – ‘Fly Me Away’)

Hanging Pig (2001) - Shadow Chamber

After completing his third photographic volume, Platteland (created 1986–1994; published 1996), Roger Ballen changed direction. A new aesthetic emerged from his new interaction, as an artist, with his subject matter in the construction of each image. A team of two, Roger Ballen and the world, embarked on a voyage to find the obscure in the most banal or surprising of objects. His experiences during these years would ultimately culminate in his latest project: Boarding House (2009).

Talking Heads nailed it in their debut hit ‘Psycho Killer’: ‘You’re talkin’ a lot, but you’re not sayin’ anything.’ There does seem to be a lot of loose talk along these lines nowadays: recycled broken-line bullshit that sounds so damn sweet to say out loud. But sometimes one is lucky enough to encounter an individual whose words and images are so powerful, so transcendent, that they leave you just a little less jaded… and a little more real.

Meeting Roger Ballen at the Iziko Museum in Cape Town was a surreal and humbling experience… a rare lunchtime interlude that warranted no refined plastic questions. The photographs that make up Boarding House stole all concentration and left me lost in memories of experiences I’m not quite sure were ever real. I was cast into an internal dialogue of uncertainty, lingering with that bitter aftertaste of spending too much time in one’s own head. With Roger Ballen’s distant eyes lost in memories, and mine in my thoughts, a raw and unfamiliar dialogue unravelled.

Bite (2007) - Boarding House

Pathos (2005) - Boarding House

Mimicry (2005) - Boarding House

one small seed: Could you describe the atmosphere of The Boarding House?

Roger Ballen: The Boarding House is a strange and surrealistic place, certainly a place where the human condition exposed itself on all different levels. The photographs taken in the series are in many ways very abstract. Complex or not, what most people experienced from the images in Boarding House are that they take you into another zone, another place… almost a place of the psyche.

When people look at the pictures, they shouldn’t worry about ‘Where is this place, how do they get to this place or what is this place?’ And this, and that… It’s really about finding a place that reveals something about [yourself], rather than necessarily worrying how I took the picture.

oss: When I look at the images in Boarding House, I feel saturated with questions that have nothing to do with your subject matter, with questions that I stopped asking a long time ago.

RB: Well, then the art has done what it was supposed to do. Unfortunately, we live in a world where art is just about reinforcing what we know already, everybody likes to be reinforced. And that’s not what art is about. It should make people question the world around them and help to understand themselves a bit better.

oss: Speaking of questions, so many are rather about finding the answer. It’s comforting to us to know there is a solution to things.

RB: People have become scared of asking the proper questions, scared of the proper answers… We want everything packaged so we can put it under the bed and sleep at night. And unless this problem is solved, we don’t have a future as a race. All the problems come from our psyche. It’s not necessarily about ‘this’ or ‘that’, it’s about what’s going in inside our own psyche, and we have to solve that problem first. That’s the hardest issue.
There are plenty of psychiatrists around, plenty of philosophers, plenty of poets, plenty of this… plenty of that…

oss: …and plenty of self-help books.

RB: Plenty of self-help books… that’s pretty funny, yeah, and there will be plenty more.

Perhaps life – as real as it is – is constructed of scenes and instances that are so intricate, so conceptual… even revolutionary… that it seems all too overwhelming and intense to be of a worldly nature. These moments are impossible to define.

As a person with a lot to say, I still sit with many questions. I do know that, whether tragic or comic, light or dark, theatrical or real, Roger Ballen’s Boarding House is ultimately whatever it means to you. But perhaps Roger puts it best:

You can try for the rest of your life to come up with words that define these photographs, but you’re still not going to hit the bullseye. And that’s what ultimately makes good art. Art that can stand on its own… Art that doesn’t necessarily need words to explain it.

Cut Loose (2005) - Boarding House

Boarding House (2009) is published by Phaidon

Words: Sarah Claire Picton
Images: © Roger Ballen

Read the rest of issue 22:

Click here to view our #flashBack selection for September.

Click here to view all our #Flashbacks.

Roger Ballen from one small seed on Vimeo.

Part-comical, part-theatrical and ultimately impenetrable, Boarding House showcases images that provoke and make us question everything we see. Roger Ballen cultivates some highly compelling conversation about the blur between fiction and reality, and how it is represented and then interpreted. Discover what he had to say in this captivating one small seed team in this exclusive.

Screenshot

Screenshot

‘darkness’
phelios

‘disintegrates from within’
Raison detre

Produced: one small seed production