Urgent Paradise

"Urgent Paradise" is a visual research on the symbolic and cultural meaning of the palm tree in the Western collective imagination, in particular around tourism and escapism, made in collaboration with computational biologist Lucien Hinderling. For this project, Tim Rod combines different types of images, from analogue black and white photographs and street views taken during his own trips, to digitally manipulated and AI-generated images. The generated images, where trunkless palm trees are often seen floating in the sky or hovering over cityscapes, offer a dreamy but incisive metaphor of how the palm tree has become a ubiquitous symbol of the tropics and a promise of leisurely existence. In our imagination, it is indeed no longer tethered to the often harsher realities of the territories it grows in. In exhibitions, "Urgent Paradise", is often staged as site-specific installations where the simplest elements (red and yellow light, the outline of a trunkless palm tree) are used to bathe the visitors in an artificial tropical sunset.

"Don’t forget the Knifish" is an intimate narrative about Tim Rod’s complicated and fragmented relationship with his father. When he was twelve, he learned about the existence of his biological father, triggering strong emotions and deeply challenging his identity and sense of self. Fourteen years later, at age twenty-six, he was able to meet his father for the first time, in Israel. He harnessed photography equally as a means of protection and a way to mediate his emotional responses, and as a tool to make sense of this experience and craft a narrative reclaiming and reconstructing his memory and his own history. Working with different types of photographs – personal archives, portraits and street views, as well as staged, collaged or generated images – Tim Rod attempts to find coherence and meaning from a divided personal reality and a family history that relies as much on his imagination as on personal recollections from his family members. The gaps and the forged connections between different realities are highlighted in images that bring together the Jaffa oranges of his father’s home city and the firs and snowy mountains of Switzerland, or confront the faces of the father and the son. They translate the timidity, apprehensions and hesitations, but also the tenderness between a parent and a child who are getting to know each other in an emotionally fraught context.