Inside Out Art Center will open its doors in Johannesburg on Tuesday, March 28, 2023, with an exhibition highlighting the ecological crisis on the African continent… End of the Game.
Founded by internationally renowned artist and photographer Roger Ballen, Inside Out Centre is set to become a prominent landmark on the bustling Jan Smuts Avenue. It is one of three cultural centers on the central fringe of Forest Town, along with the Johannesburg Museum of the Holocaust and Genocide and Johannesburg Foundation for Contemporary ArtThe neighborhood is close to the historic site of Constitutional Hill and the district of Rose Bank, which is full of restaurants and galleries.
The Inside Out Art Centre has two main objectives: to be an art exhibition space and an educational center. It will host exhibitions exploring issues related to the African continent from a purely aesthetic and psychological perspective. The Inside Out Centre will also host a dynamic program of educational lectures, panel discussions, masterclasses, and presentations focusing on current exhibitions as well as artistic and cultural themes.
The Inside Out Art Centre is the result of several years of work. The Roger Ballen Foundation, established in 2007 and renamed the Inside Out Trust Foundation, is dedicated to arts education in South Africa. The foundation sponsors exhibitions of international artists in Johannesburg and invites speakers to address the city's students. Eventually, Ballen felt the Foundation needed a home to continue its exhibitions and programs. In January 2018, he finally found a property in an ideal location to launch his project. The Inside Out Centre was built on this land.
The name Inside Out (upside down) reflects the idea that the Inside Out Centre's exhibitions will encourage introspection, and the building's design was inspired by the same goal. Raw concrete is used for both the building's interior and exterior surfaces, the latter concealing the entrance that leads to a magnificent double-volume space bathed in natural light.
« I sometimes think the building looks like it was built 'upside down' ", comments Roger Ballen, who worked closely with local architect Joe van Rooyen of the JVR architectural firm to create an iconic building. The inaugural exhibition, " End of the Game", addresses the issue of wildlife extinction through the prisms of history and art.
Using documentary photographs, antique objects, and film clips alongside Ballen's photographs and installations, the exhibition highlights the historical significance and context of the "golden age" of African safari expeditions led by colonialists and Western figureheads—such as Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, King Edward VIII, and Hemingway—that took place in the mid-19th century. Ballen's approach explores the profound psychological relationship between humans and the natural world.
The exhibition documents the rampant hunting that led to the ecological devastation we face today. Poaching remains a significant threat to many African species, particularly elephants, rhinos, and big cats.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), approximately 20 elephants have been killed for their ivory each year in recent years, and 000 rhinos were slaughtered in 1 alone. Countries such as South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania continue to attract international trophy hunters despite concerns about animal welfare, sustainability, and ethical issues associated with the practice. The illegal wildlife trade continues.
According to Ballen, “This exhibition encourages vital discussions about how we treat animals in the world today, about wildlife management, responsible tourism, and environmental stewardship.” Animals have been an important symbol in Ballen’s work since the beginning of his artistic career. The works featured in End of the Game come from various series from the mid-1980s and include photographs, installations, paintings, and drawings. The portraits of armed men come from one of Ballen’s earliest photographic series in rural South Africa, titled Platteland… Images of Rural South Africa from 1994. A few years after completing the series, Ballen began photographing the suburbs of Johannesburg. The disappearance of the human subject, the appearance of various animal forms, linear figures, and drawings characterize his later series, most of which have been published as books. These series include Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2009), Asylum of the Birds (2014), and Roger's Rat (2017), showcasing Ballen's signature style, described as theatrical, dark, dreamlike, and absurd.
Also included are light boxes made from images from the Theatre of Apparitions (2016) presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Prior to these works, Roger Ballen and Marguerite Rossouw drew and painted ghostly figures on the windows of a warehouse in Johannesburg before photographing them.
The exhibition includes some of the artist's most recent color photographs (from 2017), marking his shift to color photography after 50 years of focusing exclusively on black and white. Over the past decade, Roger Ballen has created installations to accompany his photographs in various exhibitions. Most of these installations are made from found objects the artist has collected over the past 40 years. In this exhibition, photographs and three-dimensional artworks enrich the experience of what is now considered Ballen's unique style, called "Ballenesque."
Ballen's work explores the complex relationship between humans and animals through the artist's aesthetic. Ballen explains: " One of the main challenges of my career is to find the animal in the human and the human in the animal.. The pieces I photograph represent the conflicting relationship between civilization and nature, where opposites attract and collide in a world based not on logic but on irrationality. Delusions, mirages, dreams, and nightmares coexist and cannot be categorized as light or dark. »
Visitor information
Inaugural exhibition " End of the Game” by Roger Gallen from March 28, 2023 the Inside Out Center for the Arts.
Visits by appointment only / Reservations on the Inside Out Centre for the Arts website / Prices: R 150 and R 100 for students, including the exhibition catalogue.
For more information: www.insideoutcenterforthearts.com / Instagram: @insideoutcentre / Facebook: Inside Out Center for the Arts.
André Tirlet
