Exhibition Review:
11th Nov 2017 Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You
I really enjoyed a recent exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. It was a collection works from the past two decades by the Norwegian artist Torbjørn Rødland (born 1970). I felt that the curation was good, and that the pieces worked well in the space. Each photograph had an element of intrigue; whether it be a photo of a puzzling and ambiguous scenario with a young, topless, muscular boy holding a much older man against a wall by the throat, or a scene where a woman is resisting abduction, the attacker out of the frame and a bizarre juxtaposing brightness to the image. There was also a selection of photos which might be loosely referred to as ‘still lives’. The interest in these comes from his playfulness with the interaction of incongruent materials like fire with flesh or ice, and hair with food. I was drawn in by his photographs, and in the cases where it applied, I felt compelled to try to analyse the expressions of his subjects, to draw more about the context of their situation from them. The way the emotion has been captured leaves the narratives beguilingly ambiguous, and I think this is largely what makes his photos so intriguing.