The Theatre of Apparitions by Roger Ballen was made in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 2005 to 2013, transforming drawings and material interventions on window glass into monochrome photographs of psychic, spirit-like figures.
The project developed from Ballen's encounter with figures incised into black-painted windows in an abandoned women's prison. Rather than documenting a stable external reality, the series examines the mind as a repository of buried narratives. Its fragmented beings evoke repression, death, the afterlife, and fears of annihilation, while unstable boundaries between self and other, human and animal, and reality and fantasy suggest archetypes associated with the collective unconscious. These concerns extend Ballen's movement from the documentary orientation of Platteland and Outland toward the constructed psychological spaces of Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, and Asylum of the Birds.
Across the photographs, black fields hold pale scratches, silhouettes, mask-like faces, staring eyes, body fragments, shadows, and animal forms. Strong contrast and restricted tonal ranges flatten the image space, making figures appear suspended rather than situated within conventional perspective. Grain and irregular material textures remain visible, while sharply bounded passages of light create an uneasy, dreamlike atmosphere. The 2016 book organizes this imagery as seven theatrical Acts, moving through persona, burlesque, eroticism, transmutation, melancholy, fragmentation, and the ethereal.
Working from 2007 with his photographic assistant Marguerite Rossouw, whose knowledge of painting contributed to the development of the technique, Ballen experimented with spray paint, epoxies, emulsions, resins, glues, and other materials. These were applied directly to window glass and then scratched, cut, or removed in places so that angled natural light could pass through the cleared areas, producing the luminous marks and figures against the darkened surface. The resulting surfaces deteriorated quickly and were reused after being photographed, making photography the means by which the temporary interventions survived. Ballen initially worked with a Rolleiflex 6x6 film camera and later experimented with cameras suited to rectangular compositions, including a Mamiya and Leica Monochrom.
Thames & Hudson published the 192-page monograph in 2016. Dedicated exhibitions followed in Tel Aviv, London, New Delhi, Beijing, and Ljubljana, alongside a North American presentation in Los Angeles. In 2022, photographs from the project appeared as lightboxes in Into the Light, South Africa's pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Later installations at Johannesburg's Inside Out Centre, Christophe Guye Galerie in Zurich, and Apparitions in Venice in 2024 extended the project into immersive displays using darkened spaces, lightboxes, film, and sound.
