This publication accompanies Torbjørn Rødland's touring exhibition “Fifth Honeymoon,” featuring thirty new photographs and a new video work, his first in eleven years, as well as newly commissioned essays by the American writer and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai and artist colleague Matias Faldbakken.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, from May 24 to August 12, 2018; and at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, in 2019.
Torbjørn Rødland (born 1970 in Stavanger, Norway, lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Oslo, Norway) is a Norwegian photographer. Photographed exclusively on analog material, often in staged studio settings, Rødland's works hold a unique place in the treatment of images by artists today. His photographs have an almost uncomfortable ambiguity, fully aware as they are of the power of images and the slippery comfort of normative formats, while simultaneously showing a sincere desire for the emotions and the magic that are at play in the world. His photographs manifest what we experience as beautiful, and sometimes repulsive, but not in any conventional way. Rødland makes use of these aesthetic categories and the forms in which they are expressed, and confronts them, complicates them, and exaggerates them with contradictory concepts, such as the uncanny, the nasty, the messy.
