Torbjørn Rødland produces his photographs using film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. Drawing on familiar visual forms and genres – from still lifes to portraits to landscapes – his works avoid both the analytic tone of early conceptual art and the ironic commentary associated with the subsequent Pictures Generation.

Rather than dismantling images, Rødland seeks to grasp and integrate truth, reflecting his interest in probing the more problematic dimensions of contemporary photography and art history. He examines popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, aiming to prolong our engagement with still and moving images. His works resist immediate interpretation and instead invite viewers to explore layered meanings shaped by cultural, political, and personal contexts.

"Hat on Fire c/w Bathroom Tiles" (2016), produced for the 9th Berlin Biennale, brings two contrasting images into dialogue within a single lightbox. One side, "Hat on Fire", shows a baseball cap with the words “Make America Great Again” burning in flames. Photographed in January 2016, at the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the image has since acquired an unexpected historical charge. Opposite it, "Bathroom Tiles" presents a quieter and more ambiguous composition characteristic of Rødland’s introspective visual language.

Together, the images create a tension between topical immediacy and timeless ambiguity, spectacle and stillness. Rather than fixing a single meaning, the work invites viewers to move between them, discovering how interpretation shifts with context, memory, and time.