Interview: Torbjørn Rødland

Torbjørn Rødland: Burning Skull no. 4, 2008-10. 55 x 70 cm. Fuji Crystal Archive paper mounted on dibond and framed with museum glass Ed. of 3

To begin with, could you make a short presentation of what you have made for this exhibition?

Well, the show is a collection of different photographs. I think the oldest works are pictures of four water colours of Disney's Pinocchio and characters from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which are probably made by Hitler. I photographed them in a very small museum in Northern Norway. The owner of the museum had been in Germany to buy a water colour made by Hitler, of a German house in the mountains, but when he opened the frame, he found these water colours hidden behind the visible one. Of course one should be sceptical about their origin as a lot of fake nazi artefacts were produced after World War II, but we know for a fact that Hitler owned this animated film, and that he arranged private screenings of the it for his inner circle. So the link is there. For me it doesn't really matter if he actually sat there with a brush and painted these characters, but I think it's likely, as it would be a weird thing to fake. What also makes it believable to me, is the fact that one of them is not signed with his initials as are the others. Next to these works is a picture of Neuschwanstein, which inspired Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle. I went to Bavaria to make photographs of the castle, but when I got there I found out that the angle I wanted was totally out of reach. Instead I bought a poster and put princess stickers around the edge, then taking a photograph of it. Another work shows a photograph of Anne Frank on a Nokia Phone, held by an anonymous hand with autumn leaves in the background, and this photograph is completed by a portrait of a young girl, quite similar to the picture of Anne Frank. Lastly, there is a series, consisting of six photographs, depicting burning bodies in cremation ovens.

Torbjørn Rødland: Disney's Wagner Fantasy, 2009. 105 x 80 cm. Fuji Crystal paper mounted on dibond and framed with museum glass. Ed. of 3.		Torbjørn Rødland: Disney's Bashful by Hitler, 2008-2010. 57 x 45 cm. Kodak Endura paper mounted on dibond and framed with museum glass. Ed. of 3.

How would you describe the thematic relations between the works on show?

As usually in my shows, I am not interested in holding up just one discourse or one theme. On one level it is a discussion about cuteness and its dark flip sides. This is something I have worked with before, but I guess there is less cuteness in this show than in most of my previous ones. Nevertheless Walt Disney version of 'Cute' has influenced the whole world; for instance in Japan, you cannot really find anything similar before the impact of Disney. But what the Japanese Manga and Anime does, is bringing back all the ambivalence, the darkness, the sexuality, and violence, that Disney removed from e.g. old German stories and fairy tales, and in a way, I do the same thing by clearly linking these cute characters to a second theme of the exhibition; Holocaust. It is the main mythological story of evil and sacrifice in our culture, and Anne Frank is its main character. It is also her diary that has given the show its title, as she named her diary Kitty and usually began her entries with "Dear Kitty" or "Dearest Kitty".

Torbjørn Rødland: Blue Portrait (Nokia N82), 2009. 110 x 140 cm. Fuji Crystal paper mounted on dibond and framed with museum glass. Ed. of 3.

In several of the photographs, you incorporate different layers of reality and images - why is that?

It has to do with photography as a medium. Photography became mature in the modern period, where there has been a focus on, or a dream about, a direct, immediate form of communication and image making that is not based in history at all. For instance Picasso wanted to paint like an African or a child, and Franz Marc wanted to see and paint the world like an animal, and then there also came about a fascination of the artist as half mad, because it was believed that they had a very direct approach to making art - not a schooled one. Photography then became art precisely because it has this ability to see the world very directly and not through language. But I am advocating a different type of photography, one that reflects that we actually don't see the world like that, we also see it through cultural memory and language. My reality is partly mediated and partly based on direct observation. I think that the direct, childlike perception is a beautiful idea, but I don't really believe it is possible. But you could say, that the problem is present in this show, that I try to do both. In one side of the room I try to do images that you haven't seen before and in the other side I am focusing on and discussing other images and their role in Western culture. A third theme here could be how images and motifs through time travel from continent to continent, in this show from Germany to the US and back, and how they undergo a change of meaning.

Thanks.

Torbjørn Rødland: Amsterdam, 2007-2010. 50 x 40 cm. Kodak Endura paper mounted on dibond and framed with museum glass Ed. of 3