Through July 27, 2025, Pavilion 9a of the Rome Slaughterhouse presents Roger Ballen. Animalism, an exhibition promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo in collaboration with ISTMO, curated by Alessandro Dandini de Sylva in collaboration with Marguerite Rossouw and with a sound installation by Cobi van Tonder.
Roger Ballen is considered one of the leading and best-known contemporary photographers. With Animalism, a research he has been conducting for more than two decades, he explores the profound and often disturbing relationship between humans and animals. The images in the exhibition blur the boundaries between human and animal behavior, questioning the very nature of this distinction. Designed for the exhibition space of the Slaughterhouse in Rome, the exhibition is conceived as a single installation: a typically “Ballenesque” theater in which absurdity and primal instincts are the protagonists. The Slaughterhouse itself becomes part of the work, reinvented as a space for reflection.
The exhibition takes place in three rooms and is intended to be an immersive yet contemplative experience of Ballen’s work: it moves from a bright introductory space in which a selection of twenty-one photographs made between 1996 and 2016 can be seen, to a central dark space animated by eight projectors that present, asynchronously, more than eighty photographs of Ballen’s major projects, including Outland, Shadow Chamber, Boarding House, Asylum of the Birds, and Roger’s Rats; and finally to the space with four lightboxes and a video-animation of the Apparitions series. The central environment of the Pavilion, immersed in darkness, is designed to engage and envelop visitors. The photographs arranged chronologically trace a path that is meant to reflect the evolution of the artist’s visual language: from a more properly documentary practice to an intense staging of the photographic space, to more experimental creations with pictorial impact.
Through surreal compositions, Animalism reveals how the animal is both an external presence and an intrinsic part of the human psyche, revealing the deep connections between civilization and wilderness.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by Quodlibet, designed by Filippo Nostri, with a conversation between Roger Ballen and curator Alessandro Dandini de Sylva and plates of all the images on display.
Finally, Roger Ballen, who has repeatedly declared his admiration and artistic debt to Mario Giacomelli, is present, in a direct dialogue, in the exhibition’s Mario Giacomelli. The Photographer and the Artist visitable at Palazzo Esposizioni Rome from May 20 to August 3, 2025. From June 5 to Sept. 30, 2025, Ballen will also participate with the installation of one of his huts in the fourth edition of the Festival des cabanes 2025 scheduled at theAcademy of France in Rome-Villa Medici.
For all information, you can visit the official website of the Slaughterhouse.
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| At the Rome Slaughterhouse, Roger Ballen's exhibition exploring the relationship between humans and animals |
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