Roger Ballen’s collection of photographs, Boarding House, consists of more than 70 black-and-white images that interrogate the tension between the fictional and constructed versus the real.
Boarding House can be seen at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town until 16 January 2010. The work is intense but beautiful with an underlying sense of undeclared violence.
The worlds photographed by Ballen reveal something of the claustrophobic confines of the type of life, so typical in South Africa, characterised by both tragedy and comedy and overall disturbance.
Together with Boarding House, selected pieces from Ballen’s Dorps, Outland and Shadow Chamber collections are also on show.
