Torbjørn Rødland

Torbjørn Rødland
DEAREST KITTY

January 30 - march 13, 2010

Ny Carlsberg Vej 68, COPENHAGEN

Western critics are used to seeing cuteness as a lie – a lie told in order to sell a product. It’s been an integrated part of my project since the 90s to look for a more nuanced understanding of cuteness. To my surprise, this search led me to photographic sadism. It was in Tokyo that I first saw the link. In Japan there is an acceptance of cuteness and a history of sadism much stronger than here, but I’ve recently noticed a shift in American culture as well. The last decade gave us Inglourious Basterds and the Bush Doctrine but also incredibly cute viral videos.

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It’s been reported that Walt Disney begged the American Air Force not to bomb Schloss Neuschwanstein during the 1945 air raids. He modeled his Sleeping Beauty castle on the building, which less than eighty years earlier had been inspired by scenography from Wagner operas. I traveled to Bavaria to photograph this fantasy castle in front of snow-covered mountains, only to find that its best angle was inaccessible. I would have needed a helicopter or a small mountain expedition to make the picture I wanted and ended up buying a poster. They say Schloss Neuschwanstein is the most photographed building in Germany.

Two summers ago I photographed four watercolors signed «A.H.». For years they’d been hidden in a small frame behind one of the many watercolors Adolf Hitler painted of traditional German houses. We know Hitler owned a copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney’s first feature-length animation film. Private screenings were arranged for Hitler’s inner circle.

The skulls are photographed in cremation ovens. I longed to deal with reality in a more direct way. What can be more real than a person on fire?

One hundred years ago the New Testament was still our main story of evil and sacrifice. The World Wars changed that. The Holocaust is now our culture’s main mythological story of evil and sacrifice.

Anne Frank was fifteen when she died in Bergen-Belsen. Kitty is the name of her Amsterdam diary, our Gospel.
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Works
- Torbjørn Rødland
  Amsterdam, 2007-10
  Kodak Endura paper mounted on dibond framed with museum glass
Artist Biography
Photo: Emma Jenkinson

Torbjørn Rødland

Born in Stavanger, NO, 1970
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US and Oslo, NO

Torbjørn Rødland’s photographs are produced through film-based cameras and chemical processing. His self-aware and often uncanny photographs, films, and books are saturated with symbolism, lyricism, and eroticism. They take on existing visual forms and genres from still lives to portraits to landscapes, but without the research tone of first-wave conceptual art or the ironic commentary of the subsequent Pictures Generation. In his work, Rødland attempts to seize and integrate truth, rather than deconstruct it, reflecting his inclination to delve into the problematic aspects of contemporary photography and the history of art. He probes popular visual languages in search of both spiritual and perverse qualities, aiming to prolong our engagement with both still and moving images. His works do not offer quick readings; instead, they invite us to explore the layered nature of each image, encouraging personal interpretations based on our cultural, political, and personal contexts.

Inserting his work in a wide array of contexts Rødland’s pieces can be found in art magazines, like Middle Plane and Numéro Berlin, and in the public sphear, like his large-scale installation on the side of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. His work has also been the topic of traditional solo presentations at art institutions such as Serpentine, London; Fondazione Prada, Milan; MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center; KIASMA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; The Contemporary Austin, Texas; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Kunsthal Stavanger, Stavanger; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima; and Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art.

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