Hamiltons presented Roger Ballen’s most recent and highly anticipated body of work, The Theatre of Apparitions, for the first time as a series in early 2017. In true Ballenesque style, the series takes the reader on a journey into their subconscious. Ballen’s choice of title is to convey the theatrical mechanics in which mental forms of life – dreams, the imagination and memories – act out on stage for the psyche.
“These are spirit drawings… they are the permanent record of a bubbling up of deeper, more primal psychological realms made manifest on a surface through the interaction between a particular individual and fluid, physical materials.” Roger Ballen
Ballen was inspired by hand-drawn carvings he saw on blacked-out windows in an abandoned women’s prison, where a prisoner had drawn figures into the black paint leaving herself with nothing but the dim light and stark walls. This led to Ballen’s own experimentation with spray paints on glass, on which Ballen would then either draw on or remove the paint from to let light through, resulting in otherworldly, pre-historic-like cave paintings. Like the unconscious, these drawings are timeless. The black, dimensionless spaces on the glass are canvases for Ballen’s thoughts to be carved.
Ballen says the images were rarely planned, but rather the results of a spontaneous process in which the material created mysterious and unimaginable outcomes. Such images are not purely drawings, as without Ballen’s extensive knowledge in black and white art photography, capturing such drawings would not have been possible. His deep understanding of the ability of the camera to integrate form and content was crucial in creating these unique images. The images explore the relationships between human and canine, bird and beast, harking back to ancient shamanistic visions and sacred symbols that Ballen believes to be inherited and imbedded in humans through evolution.
Roger Ballen, Embryonic, 2009 © Roger Ballen
