PHOTO: Torbjørn Rødland-Slow Life Strategies

Torbjørn Rødland makes photographic images that pointedly address their viewers, evoking a wide range of emotional and intellectual states. Curiosity, humor, criticality, artifice, reverence for the natural world, and romanticism appear throughout his work and often in the same image. Rødland also emphasizes the formal attributes of his photographs, pushing the medium toward modes of visual expression more commonly associated with painting, and forging links between twentieth-century art photography and twenty-first-century approaches to image-making common to advertising and social media.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive

The Viennese presentation of Torbjørn Rødland’s exhibition “Slow Life Strategies” situates the artist’s practice within an expanded conversation about photography’s enduring capacity to mediate between myth, mortality, and the everyday. For over three decades, Rødland has elaborated a visual language that draws simultaneously from archaic archetypes and contemporary cultural forms, constructing images that resonate with the psychic force of collective symbolism while remaining firmly tethered to the banality of lived experience. Works such as “Cinnamon Roll” (2015) and “All Our Pretty Songs” (2021–2023) recall the tradition of seventeenth-century memento mori painting, wherein objects were configured not merely as descriptive motifs but as reminders of human finitude. Rødland’s photographs function analogously, mobilizing quotidian subject matter in ways that estrange the familiar and heighten our awareness of decay, transformation, and temporality. In “Turnstile Gate no. 1 and no. 2” (both 2020), this layering of historical and symbolic registers is particularly acute: the imagery conjures echoes of the inverted crucifixion, the hanged man of the tarot, and contemporary discourses around gender fluidity. These works resist singular readings; rather, they establish what Roland Barthes might describe as a polysemous field in which contradictory signifiers coexist, generating a surplus of interpretive possibility. Rødland’s iconographic strategies also draw upon the narrative and moral logics of the fairy tale. “The Ring” (2017) exemplifies this mode: the motif of hands recalls both healing touch and violent grasp, while the circular form invokes the long-standing allegorical lineage of enchanted rings as instruments of power, secrecy, and desire. The juxtaposition of youth and age, light and dark skin tones, extends into what Carl Jung might have called an archetypal “coniunctio oppositorum”—an alchemical marriage in which contraries are fused into new psychic configurations. Yet Rødland’s photographs remain irreducible to myth alone. They operate within a dialectical tension between the real and the uncanny, in which the everyday object or gesture becomes destabilized through compositional precision and symbolic overdetermination. Viewers are invited into a phenomenological encounter marked by uncertainty: the images withhold answers to the most basic interrogatives of representation—who, what, where, why—while simultaneously intensifying the affective immediacy of the scene. In this sense, Rødland stages what Freud termed the unheimlich: a disquieting recognition of the strange within the familiar. In the contemporary moment—when the image of “reality” is as likely to be conjured by an artificial intelligence prompt or a psychedelic vision as by empirical observation—Rødland’s practice acquires renewed urgency. His photographs insist upon a conception of reality not as given but as constructed, layered, and unstable. They gesture toward what Georges Bataille described as the “sacred” dimension of experience: a realm in which the profane world of utility and order gives way to paradox, excess, and the dissolution of categories. To linger with Rødland’s images is thus to adopt a “slow life strategy” in the most literal sense: a commitment to sustained attention, to enduring ambiguity, and to suspending the binary judgments—beautiful/ugly, right/wrong—that structure everyday perception. What emerges is not resolution but play, a perpetual oscillation between recognition and estrangement. This game of hide-and-seek, enacted between viewer and image, resonates less as a temporary exhibition encounter than as a lifelong practice of negotiating meaning in a world perpetually in flux.

Photo: Torbjørn Rødland, Mysticomimetic, 2019, Chromogenic print, Kodak Endura paper, framed, Image 45 x 57 cm / 17 3/4 x 22 1/2 in, Frame 46.5 x 58.5 x 3.5 cm / 18 1/4 x 23 x 1 3/8 in, © Torbjørn Rødland, Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Lichtenfelsgasse 5, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 5/9-25/10/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, www.presenhuber.com/