CAN Gallery presents Spirits and Spaces, a landmark exhibition by internationally acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen (b. 1950, New York), one of the most significant figures in contemporary photography. Known for his distinctive Ballenesque visual language that merges photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Ballen creates worlds that are at once unsettling and psychologically charged
Having lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for most of his life, Ballen began his career documenting small towns and their isolated inhabitants. Over five decades, his practice evolved from social documentary into what he terms “documentary fiction”—staged, symbolic compositions that function as existential psychodramas. His images delve deep into the human psyche, exploring themes of chaos and order, madness, mortality, animality, and the archetypes that shape our subconscious.
Ballen’s work is held in major international collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), MoMA (New York), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the State Museum of Russia (Moscow), Tate Britain (London), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). The artist has published more than twenty-five books, directed several short films, and in 2022 represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale Arte. He is also the founder and director of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.
Presented in conjunction with Roger Ballen’s retrospective at the Benaki Museum, this exhibition marks a defining moment in his fifty-year career. For the first time, Spirits and Spaces unveils Ballen’s new series of color photographs, exhibited alongside his series of photographic negatives, Hungry Ghosts.
Although long opposed to color photography, Ballen’s perception shifted unexpectedly in 2016 when he received a Leica SL camera as a gift. The camera became a catalyst for experimentation, allowing him to explore the expressive potential of color and light within his unique visual lexicon.
Spirits and Spaces captures the absurd and uncanny world of Roger Ballen with striking clarity. Within claustrophobic rooms lined with worn wallpaper and lit with austere precision, sculptural constructions, animals, and Art Brut-inspired drawings coexist. Human figures appear as shadows or fragmented presences, forming compositions that oscillate between comedy and tragedy, chaos and control. The result is a visual realm that defies logic—a space where reality and dream, life and art, collapse into one another.
In the basement of CAN Gallery—a former SAS bunker—Ballen presents a curated selection from his Hungry Ghosts series. These negative photographs reveal a subterranean dimension of his practice, where figures materialize from darkness like echoes of memory and dream. Here, the inversion of light and shadow becomes a metaphor for the human condition itself: presence born from absence, visibility from invisibility. Through these haunting images, Ballen invites viewers to confront the inner phantoms of consciousness—the hungry ghosts that linger within us all.
Together, Spirits and Spaces and Hungry Ghosts offer a profound meditation on the nature of existence and imagination. They mark both a turning point and a culmination in Roger Ballen’s extraordinary journey—one that continues to challenge the boundaries of photography and the limits of perception.
Roger Ballen: Spirits and Spaces
8 November 2025 – 24 January 2026
Opening: Saturday, 8 November, 12:00 – 16:00
Venue: CAN Gallery
