Roger Ballen & Asger Carlsen No Joke 16.09.2016 – 22.10.2016 EN DE Lars Dittrich and André Schlechtriem are pleased to present NO JOKE, the revolutionary collaborative series by Roger Ballen and Asger Carlsen. The self-contained series of 37 black-and-white photographs premieres in its entirety during Berlin Art Week, opening September 16 and running through October 22, 2016. A significant follow-up presentation has been selected to be featured at Paris Photo 2016 in November. essay EN DE Abracadabra, I sit on his knee. Presto chango, and now he is me. Hocus pocus, we take her to bed. Magic is fun, we’re dead. The self-portrait “Carlsen and Ballen” marks the point of departure for the following reflections, and it is the key to “No Joke” (2016), a collaborative work by the American artist Roger Ballen (b. 1950) and his New York-based Danish colleague Asger Carlsen (b. 1973). A bare-chested Ballen sits on a stool. Gazing into the camera, he holds a dummy bearing Carlsen’s boyish features in his arm. The constellation of the puppet master with his creature on his lap recalls depictions of a very particular genre of popular entertainment: the art of ventriloquism. As David Goldblatt has pointed out in his essay on “Art and Ventriloquism,” the ventriloquist is a very peculiar and allegorical figure. He lends the lifeless doll a voice that is a defamiliarized and bizarre version of his own. In his act, the puppeteer listens intently to his puppet to create the semblance of a lively exchange: he listens to himself and to his own creation as a third party. The lines demarcating who says what and who is what are blurred. Yet the dummy that also appears in the matching piece “Puppetry” is more than a mere placeholder, a proxy for imaginary selves and others. Ventriloquism has its root in religious rituals in ancient Greece; much later, the ventriloquist’s performance became an integral part of the nineteenth-century variety theater [fig. 1]. Meanwhile, the art of ventriloquism has always also been a medium of vocal indirection that allowed parallel worlds to emerge. The act may be funny at first, but the dummies and the worlds they beckon us into are sinister. In the psychological thriller “Magic” (1978), Fats, a dummy in a plaid shirt and dungarees with an aged boy’s face that Corky Withers, played by Anthony Hopkins, hopes will help him break into show business, soon awakens to an uncanny life of his own [fig. 2]. His antics eventually throw the roles played by the movie’s human characters into utter confusion. READ MORE Roger Ballen and Asger Carlsen, Rats, 2016, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag pearl paper, Edition 1/6 + 2AP, 60 x 40 cm Roger Ballen and Asger Carlsen, Voyeurs, 2016, Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag pearl paper, Edition 1/6 + 2AP, 60 x 40 cm instagram facebook OPENING HOURS Mon-Sat: 11.00AM — 6.00PM CONTACT DETAILS Dittrich & Schlechtriem ConceptStore GmbH Linienstrasse 23, 10178 Berlin, Germany Phone +493024342462 info@dittrich-schlechtriem.com