Torbjørn Rødland's exhibition "Songs for the Sun" at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai opens today, marking Rødland's first solo exhibition in China. The show is on view through October 12, 2025
"Yuz Museum is pleased to present “Songs for the Sun,” the first solo exhibition in China of Torbjørn Rødland, a pioneer of contemporary photography, featuring more than 20 works spanning from 2005 to 2023. Through his unique visual language full of calmness and tension, Rødland transforms ordinary scenes of everyday life into poetic expressions that contain existentialist thinking, reflecting the emotional atmosphere of the current era and the living conditions and spiritual aspects of modern people.
In the digital age of information and image overload, Rødland insists on the traditional photographic process of analog photography and darkroom development. This choice itself is a gesture of resistance. The image is transferred to the film through the lens and the shutter capturing the moment; it appears in the liquid through chemical processing after being projected onto the photographic paper. This process not only emphasizes the physical existence of the images, but also constitutes a profound reflection on the virtuality of digital images, and the image production and consumption of today. Although at first glance, Rødland’s photographs blend the language of art photography in the 20th century with the image styles that are prevalent in advertising, entertainment, popular culture, and social media in the 21st century, he questions all the influences he has internalized from an almost detached perspective. Through his lens, delicious food is placed in unfamiliar contexts or juxtapositions, which is different from traditional food photography, creating a grotesque sensory experience due to psychological suggestion. Models are often in abnormal postures with a vacant look to show a sense of alienation from specific narratives. Ordinary portraits are given a solemnity that is almost like a religious ritual, which may seem like a parody of popular aesthetics, but also attempts to “distill their mystery or contradiction, to purify their poetic juices.” The body is often regarded as a disassembled object, and the partial close-up of the limbs presents subtle images, blurring the boundaries between humans and objects, and evoking people’s fetishistic tendencies and fear of dehumanization. Rødland is adept at constructing abnormalcy out of ordinary daily scenes, but a sense of “normalcy” could be clearly seen in his landscape photography; rather than capturing spectacles, he pursues a balance between the normal and the abnormal, and therefore, he is extremely restrained in dealing with some magnificent landscapes.
Rødland’s photographs often present fascinating but elusive scenes. His works encompass a variety of themes that are difficult to categorize or cannot be simply defined, like a carefully designed visual puzzle that invites the audience to solve, but refuses to provide any clues or clear answers. This concept of rejecting a single perspective and embracing multiple interpretations is deeply rooted in his work, showing the artist’s deliberate strategy to challenge certainty. His images often wander between contradictory poles – familiar and strange, reasonable and absurd, innocent and violent, sacred and secular, pleasant and disturbing at the same time. Rødland once quoted Roland Barthes’s statement in The Pleasure of the Text as a defense for his own “photographic pleasure,” for images “that destroy, to the point of contradiction, their own discursive category, their genres.” Contradiction creates a kind of rupture, which enriches the images with tension and impels meaning to grow and flow out of it. Rødland does not seek to fully convince the audience. He constantly challenges their existing visual experience and cognitive boundaries. Such openness evokes a wide range of their curious and sophisticated sentiments and intellectual experiences.
Rødland’s photography is neither a record nor a representation of reality. The exhibition, titled “Songs for the Sun,” highlights the close connection of his works with nature and light. However, most of his works are obviously lit with light sources other than sunlight, suggesting that the images are “indirect and symbolic statements rather than depictions of a readily available reality.” His photographic practice ultimately points to a rebellion that refuses mediocrity, a game without Bingo, and a song that goes on ceaselessly."
