“It is the traveller only who is foreign”, an exhibition by acclaimed Danish artist Claus Rohland, centred on colour photographs taken in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Syria in the 1970s. Over the decades, humidity damage on the diapositives has transformed these images into poetic, almost mirage-like images of memory.
The title of the exhibition is based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s thought: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.” In Rohland’s works, the question of foreignness shifts from the subject depicted to the viewer: the foreigner may not be another person or an unknown place, but the one who looks — with their own gaze, knowledge, prejudices and limits.
