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, Pet, and Pig…
This exhibition showcases twelve of Roger Ballen’s photographs. in black & white or color, each individual animal is represented.
In an echo of Walker Evans’s documentary portraits of 1930s despair-era farmers in the North American dustbowl, Roger Ballen’s photographs from the early 1980s chronicle the inadequate,  marginalized white persons of the dorps – small villages in the platteland of South Africa – who had the moment been beneficiaries of Apartheid but ended up confronted by economic wreck.
These figures seemed to categorical realities and associations for which no words promptly sprang to mind like the art brut that Ballen had encountered as a college student in the US, the two their lives and the visuals of them selves that they unconsciously generated, transcended any “polite” plan of society and fell as a substitute into unsettling archaic patterns and archetypes that had no obvious boundaries or meanings.
Out of this, an vital strategy emerged: humanity was an integral aspect of the pure planet and was not necessarily superior to the relaxation of it.
Due to the fact that time, Ballen has concentrated on producing images even further, drawing inspiration for his films and installations from his activities of isolated minorities in urbandistricts.
In this kind of chaotic, claustrophobic spaces he finds synergy with people who, for a variety of good reasons, have turned down social conventions to build isolated cultural designs of their individual.
For him, this course of action is a vital portion of the excavation, discovery, and expression of a barely conscious parallel existence which at some stage he – and we all – share.
For Ballen, the frequently tense, or destructive, intimacy in between animals and humanity, with their diverse behavioural and environmental wants, contributes to a significantly wider ecology, aspect of a cosmology or holistic process of being.
This has offered an inspiration for his soon-to-be-opened Inside of Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg where by numerous of his new installations, set along with prior photos and movies, emphasis on the existential impression of artwork not only for people within unique societies, or continents, but also for us collectively, through the full planet.

David Elliott, Author and curator.

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