The Musée de l’Élysée de Lausanne will exhibit the work of photographers Pieter Hugo and Roger Ballen through September 2, 2012, along with the museum’s latest acquisitions.
The exhibition This Must Be The Place, produced by the Fotomuseum Den Haag, is the first retrospective devoted to the young South African photographer Pieter Hugo, born in Johannesburg in 1976. Curated by Wim van Sinderen (Fotomuseum Den Haag) and Daniel Giradin (Musée de l’Élysée), the show brings together one hundred 60x60cm and 90x90cm prints from the series The Hyena & Other Men, Nollywood and Permanent Error, dating from 2003 to 2011.
With provocation and compassion, Hugo shows the contrasts between the modern commercial worlds of whites and the disadvantaged, marginalized world of blacks.
For the series The Hyena & Other Men, made between 2005 and 2007, he followed groups of people crossing Nigeria, meeting with, “terrible hyenas, friendly monkeys and funny pythons.” Permanent Error (2009–2010) depicts people exposing themselves to toxins as they recover metals from the inside of old computers, dumped there by industrialized countries. As for Nollywood, it shows actors and extras working for the third largest film company in Nigeria, which produces more than 500 films each year. A selection of prints from the series Albinos is also on display.
Roger Ballen’s series Asylum, produced for the Musée de l’Élysée, brings together twenty-five new images taken by the American photographer from 2008 to 2011. Four years ago in Johannesburg, where he has lived since the 1970s, Ballen visited a very peculiar house, which became the subject of his current work. He found wild birds sharing the space with humans and other animals: cats, rabbits, mice, ducks. Every room in the house was decorated by its occupant, who had drawn on the walls portraits of familiar sometimes eerie faces.
Roger Ballen named the house “Asylum”. He situates his work at the exact point that separates surrealism from art brut, to which his photographs make an unmistakable reference.
Bernard Perrine
bernard.perrine1@orange.fr

EXHIBITIONS
Pieter Hugo - "This Must Be The Place"
&
Roger Ballen - "Asylum"
June 8th - September 2sd, 2012
Musée de l'Élysée
18 avenue de l'Elysée
CH-1014 Lausanne
+41 21 316 99 11
mardi-dimanche 11-18h

EDITION
Pieter Hugo - "This Must Be The Place"
Prestel, 224 pages