Photographer and artist Roger Ballen's latest exhibition The End of the Game is an immensely disturbing and provocative examination of the subjugation and commodification of wild animals through trophy hunting and captivity.

Mexican poet and academic Cesar Cruz said that "art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable".

As I step inside American artist Roger Ballen's latest exhibition at the Inside Out Centre for the Arts in Rosebank, Johannesburg, a lion holding two human heads roars at me. I'm a little taken aback by the role reversal and remind myself that any critical examination of the human psyche and our relationship to the natural world is likely to elicit some uncomfortable feelings.

"A central challenge in my career has been to locate the animal in the human being and the human being in the animal" says Ballen.

I tell myself that stepping into this absurd world of grotesque taxidermied animals serves a necessary purpose: a critical reflection of the damage we cause to the natural environment and its inhabitants.

Installations like these poignantly elicit discomfort at the very notion of such role reversal and force viewers to question the wanton killing of animals for sport and fun. Just maybe, it might evoke questions of what it's like on the other end of a hunting rifle.

Ballen's aim, inspired by Peter Beard's The End of the Game, is to question...