JOHANNESBURG | Curating “PSYCHOPOMP!” at Roger Ballen Centre for Photography

On September 3, 2025, the new Roger Ballen Centre for Photography opened in Johannesburg, South Africa, with the exhibition PSYCHOPOMP!, curated by Boris Eldagsen.

Roger Ballen is regarded as one of the most influential visual artists of our time. His work—oscillating between photography, installation, and drawing—is world-renowned for its unmistakable, psychologically charged visual language. The new centre bears his name—and fittingly opens with a bang.

PSYCHOPOMP! is not a pleasing AI show with glossy surfaces and spectacle aesthetics. Together with international artists, curator Boris Eldagsen dares something else: here, AI is used as a tool of self-exploration, as a mirror of the unconscious, as a risky confrontation with the shadow (C.G. Jung). The exhibition seeks to help redefine the differences and unique strengths of photography and AI imagery—thus making a crucial contribution to the debate on the future of the image.

Roger Ballen himself describes this as a necessity:
“AI is transforming photography and many other fields, raising urgent creative and ethical questions. That’s why we are launching with this exhibition. We want to confront these issues head-on—and set a tone of relevance and reflection from the very beginning.”

Boris Eldagsen, who in 2023 sparked a worldwide debate on the relationship between AI, photography, and art by rejecting the Sony World Photography Award, will accompany the exhibition with lectures on the difference between photography and AI-generated images. He describes the approach of the artists he selected as:
“Rather than lingering on the glossy surface and producing ‘cool images’ somewhere between fashion and pop, they dive into psychological depths and turn AI into an instrument of self-exploration. That makes them psychopomps (from the Greek, ‘soul guides’)—in myths and religions, the beings that escort the dead into the afterlife. In psychology, it refers to a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious.”

Opening: September 3, 10:00–12:00
Venue: Roger Ballen Centre for Photography, 2 Duncombe Road, Forest Town, Johannesburg
Hours: Mon–Fri 10 am–4 pm, Sat 9 am–12 pm; admission R50 (free on Sept 6)

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Alsoguppyme (Singapore), Augustin Rebetez (Switzerland), Bengt Tibert (Poland), Boris Eldagsen (Germany), Crudguts (Brazil), Esther Hunziker (Switzerland), Imagine That (South Africa), Infrarouge (France), Ian Haig (Australia), Mind Wank (USA), Monstr Within (Netherlands), Placenta Shake (Croatia), Rosemberg (Spain), Rashed Haq (Bangladesh), Snadwich (Italy), Synthetic Pink (Belgium), Tangled In Numbers (Australia), Them Realms (Sweden), Vince Fraser (UK).

Reviews

The challenging nature of many of the images, and the dissociative nature of their origins, find a true aesthetic home in Ballen’s new centre, and stage what is becoming the key aesthetic debate of our time in a suitably provocative fashion.

James Sey

WANTED Magazine

The Centre’s debut exhibition sets a provocative tone. Titled ‘PSYCHOPOMP!’ and curated by Boris Eldagsen, the show […] is a collection of uncanny, surreal, and sometimes unsettling works by more than 20 artists from across the globe.

Art Africa Magazine

It would have been easy to begin with celebration; instead, the Centre begins with disruption, pressing audiences to reckon with technology, and with themselves. In the shock of PSYCHOPOMP! we glimpse not just machine output but our own fragments returned to us. The message is unmistakable: this is not a house of reassurance. It’s a space for difficult questions.