It is an exquisite composition of the front door of a house in Hopetown from 1983. The photograph of the teenager with a glass eye from 1994 comes close to being an anthem. Ballen's work for some time now has been interactive. The faces are the ones though that we have come to expect from Ballen, sometimes slightly more alive, but mostly those same sad, depleted and poverty-stricken folks from Platteland. Instead of sitting there, they now interact with Ballen.
Masks make an appearance, sometimes grotesque, sometimes childlike.
So too do a variety of pets, including one Brian's pet pig - which the municipality wants removed from his house. Ballen grew up with Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy pictures on the wall of his mother's picture agency in Manhattan, and his art owes much to their surrealism. Yet Ballen is still the ringmaster in his alarming circus of misfits and odd beauties. He still declines a social responsibility in his art. The exhibition of Outland opens at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg on Sunday March 25.