hungry ghosts

In Hungry Ghosts images and words combine themselves to make present the absent. The title and the structure of the book come from Petavatthu (Tales of the spirits, literally ‘hungry spirit’), a buddhist collection of 51 poems that evoke dramatic stories of ghosts and restless dead who suffer because of the bad deeds of their previous lives but are given a chance for redemption. The book maintains this formal and content-based approach by combining it with the suggestion of epigraphs from the ancient world. Gabriele Tinti’s 51 poems are composed in the form of epigrams which, in relation to Roger Ballen’s images, force to reckon with the mystery of the thirst of transcendence, with the desire and fear for death and the afterlife.

Roger Ballen studied psychology at the university of California and later obtained his PHD at the Colorado school of mines, specialising in mineral economics. In 1973 he began travelling and crossed Asia overland. In 1974 he reached Cape Town from Cairo. In 1975 he took his first photographs for the project boyhood, which was published in 1977. His publications include Dorps: Small Towns of South Africa (1986), Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa (1994), Outland (2001), Shadow Chamber (2005), Boarding House (2009), Asylum of the Birds (2014), The Theatre of Apparitions (2016) and the major retrospective volume published in 2017, Ballenesque Roger Ballen: A Retrospective.

Gabriele Tinti is an italian poet and writer. He writes inspired by masterpieces of ancient art and collaborates with institutions such as the Capitoline Museums and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His poems have been performed by Willem Dafoe, Kevin Spacey e Abel Ferrara. in 2016, he published Last Words in collaboration with the american artist Andres Serrano. In 2020 he released The Earth Will Come to laugh and to Feast, a collection of poems in collaboration with the artist Roger Ballen. In 2021 he published Rovine, and in 2022 the poetry collection Sanguinamenti. Incipit Tragoedia. In 2023 he released Confessions, a collection of poems in english with unpublished drawings by Andres Serrano.