Cross the Abyss – Apparitions in Venice – Soundtrack for Roger Ballen

Curator: Roberta Reali
Soundtrack: Cobi van Tonder
Sound engineering: Marino Basso

Venue: Galleria SpazioEventi La Toletta
Fondamenta di Borgo, Dorsoduro 1134 – Venezia

Dates: 20/09 – 20/11/2024

“The Theatre of Apparitions, the most renowned experimental work by cult photographer Roger Ballen (NY 1950), and his Artistic Director, Marguerite Rossouw, returns to Venice from 20 September to 20 November 2024 at SpazioEventi of the La Toletta bookshop, in collaboration with Alice Schanzer Gallery, after having been exhibited, in another version, on the luminary lightboxes of the South African Pavilion at the 2022 Biennale.

The series of works chosen for the exhibition ROGER BALLEN. Apparitions in Venice features a selection of extraordinary photographs appearing in the shelf-lined belly of the Fondamenta di Borgo gallery, visually illuminated by the space’s high-definition light design.

The immersive quality of this show is enhanced by Cross the Abyss, the original soundtrack of the South African composer Cobi van Tonder, whose site-specific composition makes the exhibition interiors pulse with dense and subtle vibrations, diffusing the synthesized physicality of electronic sound into the ambient. Music in dialogue with the visual Apparitions, suspended in darkness, reflects murmurs, voices, lights, shadows, cries and whispers, laughter and sudden movements.

This is the ‘Ballenesque’: a surreal theatre composed of figures of archaic and unconscious psychic interaction, personifying clusters of thoughts, life and death, impulses, and unfathomable emotions. These projections of the primitive mind display a humorous kermesse of Freudian archetypes in a ‘cruel’ dialogue oscillating between the poetics of Artaud and Lacan.

The Theatre of Apparitions aims to break down barriers of separateness and create a profound relationship with the viewer, investigating common origins in the nocturnal abysses of the universe — a cosmos manifesting as an appearance created by the mind, much like photographic light drawing an image from corpuscular matter in the darkroom.

The entrancing architecture of sound and image that envelops and enraptures the viewer in ROGER BALLEN. Apparitions in Venice is conceived precisely in this sense.”
— Roberta Reali
(from itinerarinellarte.it)

Press & Coverage

• Art in Italy: Le Apparizioni di Roger Ballen a Venezia – Ultima Settimana
• RogerBallen.com: Roger Ballen – The Theatre of Apparitions (Artribune)
• La Toletta: Roger Ballen exhibition info