Tim Rod holds a BA in Art Education from HKB, Bern, and has received advanced training in photography from CEPV, Vevey. He is currently pursuing an MA in Contemporary Arts Practice at HKB, Bern.

Tim explores the themes of exile and habitat. Over the past few years, he has delved into his own roots and origins, driven by reflections on the notions of displacement and a sense of belonging. He uses the photographic portrait to create a sense of strangeness or familiarity between the model and the viewer. This ambiguity refers to the perception of others as exotic territory or, on the contrary, as a being similar to a mirror of oneself.

“When I was twelve years old, my mother told me that the father I had known until then was not my biological father. She told me about a trip she made in the early 1980s and about a young soldier she had met on the coast of the Red Sea at the foot of Mount Sinai. That day I discovered that an essential part of my identity was a secret, that triggered strong and deep emotions within me.
For a long time, I did not know if I should open the Pandora‘s box that undermined the fragile balance between my family members. In January 2019, I met my father for the first time, I was 26 years old at the time. The uncertain journey took me to Israel.

I used the camera as a shield when I faced him for the first time. It helped me deal with this emotional experience, and at the same time it gave me the courage to take that first step. In my search for my father, photography became a means of poetic interpretation and a way to reconstruct my own memory, to reconfigure the past and reappropriate the history that had escaped from me until then. The camera was primarily a tool of introspection; I observed my body to find traces of my father‘s heritage. I relied on my feelings to enter into a process of metacognition, becoming both object and subject. My story is told from the point of view of a teenager who grows up with many unanswered questions and who, through the fragments he has about his father, loses himself in a world where imagination seems to mix more and more with reality.

My father suffered his first stroke when he was barely fifty. He had to learn to speak and move again.
I met him shortly after his third stroke. I learned from his ex-girlfriend that doctors and neurologists can‘t explain why he is still able to communicate and go through life on his own. A brain scan showed that his neuronal connections are completely messed up. Questions about his past he can answer only fragmented. So I was and am forced to piece together his story from the memories he still has and archival material.
Images from my world and his world become a whole by means of collage technique. His condition has deteriorated in recent months and as long as he still has time, I want to go visit him and try to make sense of our story.”