TORBJØRN RØDLAND
Torbjørn Rødland, This is My Body, 2013-15. Courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Algus Greenspon
Afterimage by Ann-Christin Bertrand:
What always comes back to my mind are the images by Torbjørn Rødland. I worked with him many years ago when curating his show at C/O Berlin, but even now, those images still hold up. He’s referring to so many fields of visual culture that are relevant for us—whether it’s art history, religion, pop culture, or social media. So his images at first sight seem very familiar and make us immediately find numerous links to other visual worlds we know.
But then, this familiarity comes along with a certain weirdness—something slightly uncanny, unfamiliar, surreal—that evokes very mixed feelings. And that connects the intellectual perception with emotion. It’s exactly this connection that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, allowing his images to stay in our minds instead of just becoming part of the constant image flow surrounding us everywhere.
I recently invited Brooklyn-based artist Charlie Engman to give a lecture at BA Camera Arts, the study programme I am currently heading at Lucerne University.* He said that when he published his latest book, Cursed, people reacted very emotionally—either completely repelled or totally loving it. There seems to be a kind of link to Rødland, although Engman, in Cursed, works entirely with AI, while Rødland works with analogue photography and is much more focused on materiality and physicality. But this triggering of emotion, this uncanniness and surrealism—they both share that. For me, there’s something similar in how their work functions. They confront us with images that are at once familiar and strange, that make it impossible to rely on our usual categories of perception.
I like to compare it to walking—something very natural for us, just like the act of seeing. But then, once you stumble over something, your next steps become cautious. You think, “I have to be careful,” and you place your foot more deliberately. You become aware of something that usually happens automatically. And for me, Rødland’s images work the same way. They are images you stumble on, and suddenly you become aware of your own process of seeing—how you see, what you see, and how you move through the world. Afterwards, you’re more attentive to the imagery that surrounds you and the mechanisms behind it. At least, that’s the effect his images have on me.
His work This is My Body, which I selected for Afterimage, is already about ten years old, but it still works well for me. It brings together both layers: mind and intellect, gut and emotion, body and feeling. There’s something caring in the depicted gesture on one side, but it could also completely shift in a weird direction. There’s innocence, but at the same time an erotic touch—and also a religious one. Rødland manages to hold all of that at once. There’s something strange in the situation—the person being depicted oscillating between adult and child, between masculine and feminine—the gesture between care and, at the same time, enclosure or power.
And I think that’s what makes a good image for me today. In this omnipresent visual culture, I need something that involves me emotionally, something that isn’t easily readable or solvable, something even unsettling. The more the message or situation depicted stays unsolvable, ambiguous, the more it stays with you—because you’re chewing on it, you want to grasp it, and you just can’t.
*Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts / Design, Film and Art.
Afterimage is an ekphrastic series about that one image you see when you close your eyes, the one still lingering in your mind. We invite artists and writers to reflect on an image they can't shake. This column has been a part of Objektiv since our very first issue in 2010.