Roger Ballen

The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.

South African producer / director JON DAY spent the last 5 years making a documentary about the mysterious rap-rave group, DIE ANTWOORD. Art directed by surrealist photographer, ROGER BALLEN. Narrated by NINJA & ¥O-LANDI'S daughter, 16 JONES.

An American who has lived in South Africa for the past thirty years, Roger Ballen began his career as a geologist. He is now one of the most important and influential photographic artists of the 21st century.

To mark the publication of his much-awaited new monograph, Asylum of the Birds, photographer Roger Ballen, with director Ben Crossman, has produced this psychologically powerful, unforgettable film that follows Roger into a world synonymous with his photographs, as never before seen on film.

The dusty cells underneath the former insane asylum in Rozelle's Callan Park have been silent and empty for decades, a relic of a brutal and less-enlightened era. But it doesn't require much imagination to feel and hear the pain and anguish those walls once witnessed. And now those tiny, terrifying spaces are once again populated. Thankfully, not by the ranks of the rejected and stigmatised but by a series of unsettling tableaux created by US photographer Roger Ballen.

The film explores a theme that runs through most, if not all of the artist's work, people who are marginalised by society. This is explored through the lens of the unmistakable aesthetic of the Ballenesque and for a brief moment in time we are submerged in the surreal subterranean world of Roger the Rat, which may seem alien and cold to some while perhaps others know it only too well.

The South Bank Show is a television arts magazine show produced by ITV between 1978 and 2010. A new series began on Sky Arts from 27 May 2012. Presented by Melvyn Bragg, the show aims to bring both high art and popular culture to a mass audience.

To mark the publication of his much-awaited new monograph, Asylum of the Birds, photographer Roger Ballen, with director Ben Crossman, has produced this psychologically powerful, unforgettable film that follows Roger into a world synonymous with his photographs, as never before seen on film.

The dusty cells underneath the former insane asylum in Rozelle's Callan Park have been silent and empty for decades, a relic of a brutal and less-enlightened era. But it doesn't require much imagination to feel and hear the pain and anguish those walls once witnessed. And now those tiny, terrifying spaces are once again populated. Thankfully, not by the ranks of the rejected and stigmatised but by a series of unsettling tableaux created by US photographer Roger Ballen.

The film explores a theme that runs through most, if not all of the artist's work, people who are marginalised by society. This is explored through the lens of the unmistakable aesthetic of the Ballenesque and for a brief moment in time we are submerged in the surreal subterranean world of Roger the Rat, which may seem alien and cold to some while perhaps others know it only too well.