The Touch That Made You

The Touch That Made You was published for Torbjørn Rødland's first UK exhibition, at the Serpentine Galleries in 2017. The show surveyed staged photographs spanning two decades of the Los Angeles-based, Norwegian-born artist's practice.

Rødland's images (portraits, still lifes and landscapes built from deliberately awkward staging and glossy, analog-photography surfaces) work to defamiliarize and disrupt the realm of the everyday, returning obsessively to motifs of produce, body parts and viscous substances. The exhibition also included his 2005 film 132 BPM, which animates its subjects to a driving rhythmic beat. The catalog's title, per the gallery, gestures at once to the physical and immaterial aspects of the images: the rays of light and liquid touches that reveal a photograph in the darkroom, and the framing and staging enacted through the lens.

Rødland has published extensively with MACK and other art-book presses; this Serpentine/Koenig Books catalog, edited by Amira Gad and Joseph Constable, is the institutional survey accompanying his first major UK show.