Chaos has Many Faces (10.25 - 01.26)

Chaos Has Many Faces brings together three powerful artistic investigations — Spirits and Spaces, Beyond Genocide, and South–South Conversations — each confronting how chaos shapes human history, politics, and the psyche.

At the heart of the exhibition is Spirits and Spaces, the first major body of colour work by Roger Ballen, one of the most influential photographic artists of our time. Over a career spanning five decades, Ballen has redefined the boundaries between photography, psychology, and the subconscious. Now, embracing colour for the first time, he constructs surreal dreamscapes that navigate chaos, memory, and the afterlife. Curated by Marguerite Rossouw, the exhibition transforms these works into an immersive environment, offering audiences a rare glimpse into Ballen’s world at its most visually and emotionally charged.

Roger’s Rats consists of the final photographs Ballen produced using the media of film. The images shown here revisit the artist’s decade-long exploration of rats as symbolic inhabitants of his Ballenesque world. Through this theatre of drawings, objects, and absurd juxtapositions, Ballen reframes the cultural meanings of rats, challenging viewers to reconsider the boundaries between nature, symbolism, and the shadows of the human mind.

In South–South Conversations, Argentine artist Marcelo Brodsky traces connections between resistance movements in Africa and Latin America, exploring how images become witnesses to collective memory, protest, and renewal.

Together, these works form a multi-layered conversation about the faces of chaos — historical, political, cultural, and psychological — and the role of art in transforming violence into vision, trauma into understanding, and darkness into dialogue.