“Spirits and Spaces” by Roger Ballen: Photography Exhibition at CAN Gallery

CAN Gallery presents the new exhibition by American photographer Roger Ballen, titled “Spirits and Spaces,” on view until January 24, 2026.

About the Artist

Photographer Roger Ballen (b. 1950, New York) is known for his distinct Ballenesque visual language, which merges photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation to create unsettling psychological worlds. Having spent most of his life in Johannesburg, South Africa, Ballen began his career documenting small towns and their isolated inhabitants while working as a geologist and mining consultant.

Over the course of five decades, his practice has evolved from documentary photography into what he describes as “documentary fiction,” composed of staged, symbolic constructions he calls “existential psychodramas.” His work explores the subconscious and the repressed, focusing on themes such as chaos and order, madness, mortality, human–animal relationships, and the archetypes of the psyche.

Ballen has published over twenty-five books, directed several short films, and his works are held in major international collections including MoMA (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), State Museum of Russia (Moscow), Tate Britain (London), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). In 2022 he represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale and is the founder and director of the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Johannesburg.

About the Exhibition “Spirits and Spaces”

The exhibition at CAN Gallery is presented in parallel with Roger Ballen’s major retrospective at the Benaki Museum and marks a defining moment in the artist’s five-decade career. It unveils, for the first time, his new series of color photographs, “Spirits and Spaces,” as well as a selection from his negative-image series “Hungry Ghosts.”

Roger Ballen, Window Shelf (Hungry Ghosts), 2012 | Inkjet print on archival paper | Paper size 60x60cm | Ed. 2 of 3 (+2a.p.)

Although Ballen rejected color photography for many years, he found himself unexpectedly captivated in 2016 after receiving a Leica SL camera as a gift. Embracing this new tool, he began exploring the expressive possibilities of color and light, opening new pathways of experimentation within his signature Ballenesque visual vocabulary.

The “Spirits and Spaces” series vividly captures Ballen’s absurd and uncanny universe, where animals, sculptural constructions, and Art Brut–style drawings coexist, while the human presence is reduced to shadowy figures or fragmented body parts. The scenes unfold inside claustrophobic environments made of worn wooden panels lined with wallpaper and illuminated with stark, austere precision.

Within this dense, oppressive space, Ballen shapes a world that defies logical explanation, a world where absurdity, chaos, comedy, and tragedy coexist in fragile equilibrium. Serving both as a visual revelation and an artistic evolution, Spirits and Spaces marks a milestone in his oeuvre.

Warrior (Spirits and Spaces), 2020 | archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl paper | Paper size 80x80cm, Image size 65x65cm | Ed. 2 of 3 (+2a.p.)

Meanwhile, in the basement, a former shelter, of SAS, Ballen presents a curated selection of works from the Hungry Ghosts series. These negative photographs function as portals into an underground, unconscious realm, where forms emerge from darkness like shadows of memory and dream.

The use of negative film is not merely a technical choice but a deeply existential act: the inversion of light and darkness becomes an allegory of the human condition, where presence is born from absence and the visible from the invisible. Through distorted figures, scratches, and fleeting glances, Ballen invites us to confront not external reality but the shadows that inhabit us, the “hungry ghosts” of consciousness.