Curator Gallery Tour: Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind

Professor Colin Rhodes, curator of Roger Ballen’s Theatre of the Mind, will give an exhibition tour, preceding the official opening on Saturday 27 May at 4pm. Rhodes will be speaking alongside the provocative collection of 75 black and white images drawn from the last two decades of work by photographer Roger Ballen. The exhibition is conceived as five suggestive ‘theatres’: Theatre of the Absurd, Theatre of the Real and Unreal, Theatre of the Hidden, Forbidden Theatre and Theatre of the Mind.

“I believe that Ballen’s photographs are made and remade through the active participation of viewers. Theatre, then, is as much a metaphor for living a life in which we are both audience and participant as it is for the formalised construction of an event. In his work, Ballen produces visual reports of psychological realities. His photographs are emphatically engaged objects without critical distance. Though they are exquisitely constructed as form, viewers are dragged into them, so to speak. They are an encounter.” – Colin Rhodes, 2016

This survey exhibition was developed by Colin Rhodes at the University of Sydney and toured by Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery in partnership with Tauranga Art Gallery. The exhibition is Ballen’s first solo exhibition in New Zealand and is part of the Auckland Festival of Photography 2017 programme.

Image: Roger Ballen, Cat and Mouse, 2001

27 May, 8am-6pm