Theatre of the Mind

The dusty cells underneath the former insane asylum in Rozelle’s Callan Park have been silent and empty for decades, a relic of a brutal and less-enlightened era. But it doesn’t require much imagination to feel and hear the pain and anguish those walls once witnessed. And now those tiny, terrifying spaces are once again populated. Thankfully, not by the ranks of the rejected and stigmatised but by a series of unsettling tableaux created by US photographer Roger Ballen.