Unleashed is the first “four handed” exhibition, created between the Netherlands and South Africa like an exquisite corpse, of major international photographer and an artist brilliantly inspired by issues concerning representations of nature.
Photographer Roger Ballen and artist Hans Lemmen joined forces for a shared creation. Since his installation in South Africa, Ballen developed a piece where social critique often takes the form of “documentary-fictions”. Interested in the marginalized people who populate the outskirts of Johannesburg, he is revealing their strange relational proximity with animals. By joining with Lemmen, he is going further in his attempt for artistic hybridation. Lemmen, in his graphic work as in his sculptural work, pursues a tireless quest for one’s origins. Since childhood, passionate for the mark that our ancestors left in the ground, he keeps the nostalgia of a time where man did not live so outside of nature. At the mercy of a certain artistic primitivism, he denounces the sufferings of the land and living species mistreated by modernity.
Between the two artists, there is an evident imaginary community that makes them work in common. In the Netherlands, Lemmen tears apart Ballen’s photographs. He then completes the fragments or inserts them into graphic compositions. Thousands of kilometers away, Ballen uses certain drawings of Lemmen’s that he integrates into installations that are intended to be photographed. This experience is like an exquisite corpse, but goes beyond the formal exercise by pushing each artist to integrate the process of the other. Certainly, an exhibition not to be missed during the Mois de la Photo du Grand Paris.
Roger Ballen & Hans Lemmen, Unleashed
From March 7 through June 4, 2017
As part of Mois de la Photo du Grand Paris
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
62 Rue des Archives
75003 Paris
France
