M.O.L 30
SPOOKY Ashraf Jamal
T
rue to form, Roger Ballen’s contribution to the Venice Biennale was dark and spooky. Titled ‘Theatre of Apparitions’, it was inspired by drawings on the window of a South African women’s prison. In effect, illuminated images are projections of an incarcerated prisoner’s inner life, because, of course, no matter how policed we are, we possess worlds which no panoptic system can contain. We believe, after Freud and Lacan, that our unconscious realm too can be mapped, that no territory exists which cannot be monitored, controlled, monetised. Psychographics plays an important role in the manipulation of our desires, which, digitally, are converted into likes. This is because desire too has become a commodity. For Ballen, however, life cannot be commodified. No system can contain us. The unconscious will forever remain the uncharted final frontier. Ballen’s ‘Theatre of Apparitions’ is, as the title suggests, a ghosting. Monochromatic, a void infused with light, Ballen’s illumined boxes – fenestrated, suggesting windows – remind us that no attempt to contain the world – how we see and frame it – can control the fathomless depths of being – our hungers, yearnings, fears, doubts, hopes, appeals. We are, by nature, creatures that crave. A ‘hungry ghost’ inhabits us, devours us, leaves us forever unfulfilled and unresolved. This is for the good, especially now that we have re-entered a bleak mid-winter – a time of bigotry and hate, worse, nihilism. Ballen has always understood what we proverbially dub ‘the dark side’. However, he has been persistently misunderstood because of this assignation. In his monumental book, Ballenesque, he reflects on his process and journey as an artist. The emotion he triggers is ‘pathos’, ‘a quality that causes people to feel sympathy and sadness. It evokes a deeply felt pain, and is an inherent part of the human condition; we all know we will eventually die. To reveal this emotion in a photograph is to get to the core of our existence’.
10
