Boogie Woogie Pictures : Roger Ballen & Andrew Luk : Zodiac

The Chinese Zodiac is represented by twelve animals.
In get, they are: the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Canine, and Pig…
This exhibition showcases twelve of Roger Ballen’s photos. in black & white or colour, every animal is represented.
In an echo of Walker Evans’s documentary portraits of 1930s depression-period farmers in the North American dustbowl, Roger Ballen’s photographs from the early 1980s chronicle the poor,  marginalized white folks of the dorps – smaller villages in the platteland of South Africa – who experienced after been beneficiaries of Apartheid but ended up faced by economic ruin.
This kind of figures appeared to categorical realities and associations for which no words promptly sprang to mind like the art brut that Ballen experienced encountered as a university student in the US, equally their life and the photographs of on their own that they unconsciously produced, transcended any “polite” notion of lifestyle and fell as an alternative into unsettling archaic patterns and archetypes that had no obvious boundaries or meanings.
Out of this, an crucial idea emerged: humanity was an integral section of the natural globe and was not essentially excellent to the relaxation of it.
Considering the fact that that time, Ballen has concentrated on developing pictures further more, drawing inspiration for his films and installations from his ordeals of isolated minorities in urbandistricts.
In these types of chaotic, claustrophobic areas he finds synergy with persons who, for several good reasons, have turned down social conventions to make isolated cultural styles of their individual.
For him, this system is a vital part of the excavation, discovery, and expression of a barely aware parallel existence which at some amount he – and we all – share.
For Ballen, the typically tense, or damaging, intimacy between animals and humanity, with their various behavioural and environmental requires, contributes to a substantially broader ecology, portion of a cosmology or holistic system of currently being.
This has presented an inspiration for his shortly-to-be-opened Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg the place quite a few of his new installations, set alongside former photographs and films, target on the existential effect of art not only for people today within unique societies, or continents, but also for us collectively, in the course of the entire environment.

David Elliott, Writer and curator.

 

Roger Ballen & Andrew Luk: Zodiac
2 April right until 7 Might 2022, by appointment only.
The Loft, E.Wah manufacturing facility Bldg,
Wang Chuk Hang, Hong Kong.
http://www.boogiewoogiephotography.com/