Hungry Ghosts

Hungry Ghosts sees the prize-winning poet Gabriele Tinti collaborate with the acclaimed photographer Roger Ballen on a unique artistic engagement with the furthest edges of life and consciousness. Drawing inspiration from the Petavatthu verses of the Buddhist tradition, Hungry Ghosts is a thrilling evocation of the disturbing visions and the yearnings for a world beyond that have fed both ancient and modern understandings of the afterlife.

Taking as their starting points the simplest of media--respectively the brief epigraphic verse and the photographic negative--Tinti and Ballen have produced something truly extraordinary: a masterfully crafted series of poems in dialogue with a stunning array of phantasmagoric images. Tinti’s verse has become renowned for its combination of rigorous sparseness on the level of diction with imagery of an extraordinary power and resonance. These qualities are once again much in evidence in Hungry Ghosts, but Tinti’s response to Ballen’s brilliant and disquieting works has also led him to explore an entirely new terrain: the uncanny borderlands between life and death.

Gabriele Tinti (Author)
Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has worked with the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the British Museum (among many other institutions), and his poems have been performed by actors including Abel Ferrara, Willem Dafoe, and Kevin Spacey. His work is focused on the theme of death and suffering and is mostly composed in the form of ekphrastic and epigrammatic poetry. In 2018 his ekphrastic poetry project Ruins was awarded the Premio Montale with a ceremony at the Museo Nazionale Romano in Palazzo Altemps.

Roger Ballen (Author)
Roger Ballen is an award-winning photographer based in South Africa. He is renowned both for the documentary-style works featured in series such as Platteland: Images from Rural South Africa and for his more recent, experimental images incorporating artistic forms such as painting and sculpture. His photographs have been exhibited in museums all over the world and feature in numerous permanent collections.

David Graham (Translated by)
David Graham lives in Venice and has been translating from Italian to English for almost thirty years. He specialises in art, including art criticism, mainly for exhibition catalogues. He has translated guide books for almost all of Venice’s museums and art galleries, and for some years also the catalogues for the Venice Art/Architecture Biennale. His more recent work has included several major publications for the Vatican Museums. He also likes to dabble in poetry from time to time.