Torbjørn Rødland
Fifth Honeymoon

Title: Torbjørn Rødland Fifth Honeymoon
Published by: Bergen Kunsthall, Bonniers Konsthall, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Sternberg Press
Artist: Torbjørn Rødland
Texts: Sianne Ngai, Matias Faldbakken
Language: English
Design: Mark El-khatib
Number of pages: 136
Photos: Torbjørn Rødland
Price: NOK300 / EUR32

This publication accompanies Torbjørn Rødland’s exhibition “Fifth Honeymoon”, produced as a collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma, and featuring 30 new photographs and a new video, his first in eleven years. Photographed exclusively on analog material, often in staged studio settings, Rødland’s work holds 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.

Fifth Honeymoon features all of the new works of Torbjørn Rødland’s eponymous exhibition, as well as newly commissioned essays by the American writer and cultural theorist Sianne Ngai and Rødland’s artist colleague Matias Faldbakken.