Roger Ballen. Institutional exhibitions and ongoing projects in Rome

Mario Giacomelli. Il fotografo e l’artista     
Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome
20.05.2025 – 03.08.2025

Mario Giacomelli. Il fotografo e il poeta
Palazzo Reale, Milan
22.05.2025 – 07.09.2025
 
On the centenary of the birth of Mario Giacomelli, the Giacomelli Archive has launched a series of initiatives to celebrate the artistic and cultural legacy of one of the greatest masters of Italian photography. At the heart of the celebrations is a major exhibition project divided amongst two venues, set to open in the same period: at Palazzo Esposizioni (20.05_03.08.2025) in Rome and Palazzo Reale (22.05_07.09.2025) in Milan. These two complementary exhibitions will explore the many facets of Giacomelli’s work, offering a deeper insight into his artistic vision.

Curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Katiuscia Biondi Giacomelli, the exhibition project, will present a vast selection of the master’s entire photographic oeuvre, highlighting his extraordinary ability to traverse and merge different artistic disciplines. Both exhibitions will feature around 300 original prints, many of which are previously unseen and have never been exhibited before. In Rome, the focus will be on the relationship between Giacomelli’s work and contemporary visual arts, showcasing pieces by Afro Basaldella, Roger Ballen, Alberto Burri, Enzo Cucchi, and Jannis Kounellis, whose works engage in dialogue with the photographer’s poetic vision. Milan, on the other hand, will dedicate its exhibition to Giacomelli’s deep connection with poetry, emphasizing how his visual work intertwines with the lyrical universe, transforming the image into a form of poetic narration.

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Roger Ballen. Animalism
Mattatoio, Rome
27.05.25 – 27.07.2025

From 27th May to 27th July 2025, Pavilion 9a at the Mattatoio of Rome will be hosting Roger Ballen. Animalism, an exhibition promoted by Rome the Capital City’s Cultural Affairs Department and by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, organised by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in conjunction with ISTMO, curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva in conjunction with Marguerite Rossouw, and with a sound installation by Cobi van Tonder.

The exhibition unfolds in three rooms, offering visitors an experience at once immersive and contemplative of Ballen’s works. We move from a luminous introductory space hosting a selection of twenty-one photographs taken between 1996 and 2016, to a dark central space housing eight projectors that offer visitors an asynchronous presentation of over eighty photographs from Ballen’s most important projects, including Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds and Roger’s Rats. The final space houses four lightboxes and a video-animation of the Apparitions series. The photographs, arranged in chronological order from the entrance to the back of the space, map out a path reflecting the development of the artist’s visual style, stretching from a more immediately documentary approach, via an intense staging of the photographic space, to his more experimental creations with their highly pictorial impact.

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Festival des Cabanes at Villa Medici
Fourth edition
05.06.2025 – 29.06.2025

Every summer, since its creation in 2022, the Villa Medici Festival des Cabanes has transformed the historic gardens of the French Academy in Rome into a laboratory for architectural experimentation and practice. The idea of the hut, which gives the festival its name, is the starting point for a dialogue between architects, artists, designers and artisans on some fundamental questions: how to propose non-invasive architectural forms? Which sustainable housing solutions for the future?

Among the five architectural creations – authored by Associates Architecture (Brescia, IT), Atelier MARE (Marseille, FR), The Huttopia Foundation avec Théo Karmarrec, Pierre Robion and Charles Waltmann (Lyon, FR), MBL Architectes (Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine, FR) – there is in particular Campo & Diploma 20 Architectural Association (Rome, IT / London, UK) with the intervention of artist Roger Ballen (Johannesburg, ZA), who collaborated on the CHIOSTRO hut – WHO LIVES HERE?
For the 2025 edition of the Festival des Cabanes, Villa Medici is presenting an original collaborative project between architects and students for the creation of a pavilion, and its reappropriation by a guest artist.

CAMPO’s Roman architects and international students from Diploma 20 of the Architectural Association in London have designed together a cloister composed of a portico from which one enters toward the main functions of a monastery. Inspired by Arab and Roman traditions, which have in turn been inherited from Persian and Babylonian gardens, the cloister is a central empty space that regulates a complex architectural ensemble, balancing movement and contemplation, material and spiritual needs, in order to regulate the community life of the monks. Inside the hut, South African artist Roger Ballen offers the possibility of discovering a new universe, that of an outsider artist who took a deep interest in the architectural project. This intervention, entitled Who Lives Here?, transforms the traditional architectural space into a place where the visitor is confronted with chaos: walls covered with drawings and scattered objects – clothes, toys, art objects, and paintings – that clutter the floor. The many drawings that occupy the space evoke the spirits of the afterlife, human figures on the edge of the world, trapped in this theater of broken objects. This place, on the border between the real and the unreal, becomes a dark room where visitors are forced to explore their inner emptiness, a realm of shadows and ghosts.