Roger Ballen is not an outsider artist, nor does he document outsider artists. He is presented in the show as a separate case, which subsists between def initions. A geologist by training, Ballen was born in the United States, and arrived in South Africa as part of his work, where he began taking photographs, subsequently making photography his major occupation.
Since the 1980s he has been photographing people living in abandoned houses in Johannesburg and the works found in these interiors: paintings on walls, assorted objects, and installations combining objects and background.

Ballen's exact part in the overall array remains somewhat obscure and not fully deciphered: To what extent does he stage the installations or responsible for the f inal result? To what extent does he let the subjects guide the events and surrenders to their practice?
The result is mysterious, black and white photographs shrouded in secrecy, mesmerizing, at times horrifying.

The works presented here belong to two series: "Boarding House" and
"Asylum." They contain a conspicuous presence of animals, especially birds-both alive and dead-as paintings on walls and as objects. The bird emerges in the works of many Art Brut artists as well as in Surrealist painting as a primordial archetypal image akin to a representation of a collective subconscious. The human images are always fragmentary-hand, leg, head-making it hard to tell where the painting ends and the object or actual body part begins.