BENAKI MUSEUM PRESENTS ROGER BALLEN SPIRITS AND SPACES

How far can darkness go?
South African–American artist Roger Ballen has spent decades falling into it, headfirst, eyes open.
His images slip between the real and the imagined, where the human psyche turns theatrical and the
absurd becomes truth. From the raw documentary of his early work to the strange psychological
worlds of his later series, Ballen transforms photography into something feral and hypnotic.
Spirits and Spaces, his new retrospective at the Benaki Museum, traces this descent; drawings,
installations, photographs that breathe into a single haunted, unsettling, magnetic, and brutally
human landscape.