DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM
Paris Photo 2016

At the core of each artist’s practice is an interest in the
subconscious and a skilled investigation into the complex
worlds of the archetypal outsider and the preternatural.
The collaboration examines the artists’ relationship with
the human body and mind. This position is perhaps
shaped by displacement, inherent disconnection, and
an insatiable desire to construct and communicate
this aesthetic, specifically through the processes of
photography.
Self-described outsiders—Ballen, born in New York
in 1950, now lives in Johannesburg; Carlsen, born in
Frederiksberg near Copenhagen in 1973, now lives in
New York—the two artists established a long-distance
collaboration in 2013. Based on their shared conceptual
foundation, Ballen and Carlsen began exchanging
information and digital files exclusively over email and
Skype. Images were parleyed between the two artists
over the course of several years. Manipulated, enhanced,
layered, and drawn over with each pass, they turned into
enigmatic photo-collages fusing advanced Photoshop
and digital processes, analog cut and paste techniques,
and illustrations.
In NO JOKE, Ballen and Carlsen composed photosculpted
figures, swapped self-portraits, substituted and
re-assigned body parts, oddly occupied architecture,
cut and collaged hand-drawn masks and graffiti, as
well as spiders, foxes, angels, demons and dolls—all
from their individual image inventories—in an imaginary
shared studio space, a dream-like set on which an illusive
narrative unfolds.
Not unlike the Surrealist cadavre exquis, though more
deliberate, this collaborative exchange nurtures and
challenges both artists’ practice, creating fertile ground
for the truly original to occur, something satisfyingly
awkward and uneasy. As the artists expressed it in a
recent interview with Office M agazine, “ If you c an d efine
an idea with words then you can get rid of it. You can
package it and put it in a supermarket. But if the art is
indefinable it is more powerful in the subconscious, the
subconscious can’t figure out what to do with it so it turns
it over, turns it over, turns it over, trying to come up with
some relationship to it … So the work should have that
aspect of not being easily placed. If it’s too easily placed,
it has no impact.”