Museum Dr. Guislain photo show

Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent opened “Roger Ballen.! drawing meets photography” on April 4, putting one of the best-known living art photographers at the center of its 2026 program. (museumdrguislain.be) The exhibition runs through September 13, 2026, at the museum on Jozef Guislainstraat, inside the former psychiatric institution that now houses the museum. (degentsemusea.be) Museum Dr. Guislain describes Ballen, who was born in New York in 1950 and has long lived and worked in South Africa, as a photographer whose work moves between photography, drawing, installation and painting. (museumdrguislain.be) That mix fits the museum’s own program: the institution says it uses art and photography alongside documents and records to examine psychiatry, mental wellbeing and the line between “normal” and “abnormal.” (degentsemusea.be) Photography has a special place there for historical reasons. The museum says its collection includes a large photography archive tied to 19th-century psychiatry, when doctors began using photographs as supposedly more “objective” records of patients. (museumdrguislain.be) The museum also says it continues to buy work by contemporary photographers, linking its historical collection to newer image-making practices rather than treating photography as a closed chapter. (museumdrguislain.be) Ghent’s city tourism office describes the site as the oldest mental asylum in Belgium, dating to 1857, and says the museum was founded in 1986 in response to shame over how psychiatric patients had been treated in the past. (visit.gent.be) That setting gives Ballen’s show a specific frame. The museum presents his pictures as scenes of birds, rats, bodies, rooms, scratches and masks, with reality and illusion deliberately pushed together. (museumdrguislain.be) The exhibition is not the museum’s only photography-related show this season. Its current listings also include “Monique Gies – Inside Views,” which runs until April 19, 2026, alongside the longer-running “A Home of One’s Own.” (museumdrguislain.be) For visitors, the immediate change is simple: a museum built around the history of psychiatry is now using its main temporary galleries to stage a contemporary photography exhibition that stays on view through late summer. (visit.gent.be)