Some light turbulence may occur
Torbjørn Rødland, Eline Mugaas, Vibeke Tandberg, Morten Andenæs, Bjarne Bare

A horse neighing and baring its teeth; the shadow of a tree; cherries; candy trail; a cowboy with a mask; a hand touching someone known; a parrot; a deformed spiritual lion's head; wrinkled sheet of paper unfolded like a Rorschach test; a curtain.

Some light turbulence may occur is grounded in conversations with five artists, who we believe represent some of the most interesting interactions with the photographic medium today. Upon seeing what they all presented, it was immediately clear that this was going to be an exhibition about presence in the most turbulent of times.

By recollecting the bits of what is lost and what is to be found in their surroundings, the artists, in their own curious way, transform the exhibition space into a place of transcendence through presence.

Philosophically, presence has been explored through phenomenology, particularly in the work of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who considered human experience to be deeply intertwined with perception and embodiment. In an era where digital distractions fragment our attention, presence is no longer a given but an intentional practice. Contemporary art constantly explores this tension between presence and absence by examining how the physical and virtual realms intersect.

Photography is a medium of paradoxes: it documents and distorts, reveals, and conceals, immortalizes, and estranges. In this exhibition, all five artists engage with these contradictions, offering distinct yet interwoven approaches to contemporary photographic practice. One could say their works challenge the authority of the camera, questioning notions of truth, identity, memory, and materiality.

Morten Andenæs’ work revolves around the act of looking itself. Through familiar tropes like portraits, still lifes and landscapes he explores intimacy and detachment, aggression and vulnerability, by exposing the complexities of human relationships and the politics of representation. Andenæs constructs visual narratives that unsettle assumptions about power and coherence, investigating how images not only describe the world we live in, but in fact construct it.

Bjarne Bare approaches photography with a conceptual rigor that interrogates its material and institutional frameworks. His work frequently deconstructs the photographic image, exposing its physical properties and the mechanisms of its display. Through abstraction, layering, and unexpected juxtapositions, Bare underscores photography’s inherent instability and its shifting role in contemporary visual culture—ultimately questioning its essence.

Eline Mugaas explores the spatial and emotional dimensions of everyday life. With a sensitivity to form, texture, and light, her images often focus on architectural structures, domestic settings, and overlooked details of the built environment. Her work operates in dialogue with art history and feminist discourse, reconsidering how images shape our perception of space and gendered experience. There is a forthrightness and immediacy in the depictions, and the style of execution is sensual.

Torbjørn Rødland’s images exist in an uncanny space between the sensual and the surreal. His meticulously composed photographs – often featuring ambiguous human interactions, symbolic objects, and visceral textures – evoke a deep psychological charge. Rødland’s work resists easy interpretation, revitalizing inherited forms and emotional dissonance to create scenes that feel both familiar and unsettling.

Vibeke Tandberg's images in the exhibition explore the possibilities of an old man's latex mask, a prop she has used in her artworks for over two decades. Through the mask, she focuses on the mutability of the self through digitally manipulated and staged -photography. Her work invites viewers to consider the fluidity of identity and the impact of time on the human body. During the last decade, Tandberg has included a wider range of media and techniques to continue her exploration of these themes and further challenge traditional notions of self and representation.