Roger Ballen: Die Antwoord
South Africa's premier Zef outfit captured in all their weird glory.
Overview
Cape Town duo Die Antwoord's new music video 'Cookie Thumper' will probably burn into your longterm memory. Between lead singer Yo-Landi's creepy innocence and a frankly traumatising shock ending, you'll get the gist of the quirky rap-rave band's modus operandi. Known for their unique aesthetic, statement-making videos and catchy beats, photographs from their acclaimed cult YouTube video 'I Fink U Freeky' (2012) by frequent collaborator Roger Ballen are now on display at Stills Gallery.
Die Antwoord's older videos like 'Fatty Boom Boom' and 'Enter the Ninja' are super-striking, too, with their cast of freakish faces and the bold primitivist artwork embellishing both walls and clothing. These drawings are by black-and-white photographer Ballen, a native New Yorker working out of South Africa who channels Jean-Michel Basquiat's style (shared more recently by Jody Morlock). Ballen's trademark? Glyph-like symbols scrawled with messy but deliberate lines. In his illustrated world, bird men have vaginas which they fondle, bird women have spurting penises, and totem poles of smiley faces tower next to nonsense slogans. Is it awesome? Yes.
The sketches also provide the backdrop to the award-winning 'I Fink U Freeky'. Ballen photographed a series of tableaux vivants during the video shoot, and it's these that you can scope out for the next month at Stills in the form of archival prints. Ballen is no stranger to the distorted features of people populating Die Antwoord's videos; see, for example, his 1993 portrait of Dresie and Casie, twins with incredible Neanderthal faces. The often freakish yet souped-up weirdos in Die Antwoord's videos get across the message 'inbred white trash' loud and clear — which is appropriate since the band self-identifies as 'Zef', a counterculture movement whose name translates roughly as 'common'. In the words of Yo-Landi, Zef means, "You're poor but you're sexy, you've got style."
The resulting images are like a cross between a Diane Arbus photograph and the tribal regalia portraits of Maske by Phyllis Galembo, all peppered with the trappings of Zef. They're weird. They're cool. They're what the band call 'documentary fiction'. Favourites include: Shack Scene, Bath Scene and Skelm. Ballen, whose work has hung in MoMA, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Tate and more, embraces Die Antwoord's surrealist project with the passion and weirdness of a true auteur. The music video is also on display at the gallery for your viewing pleasure, and a book is being released this month.
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