Tonje Bøe Birkeland: Invented Explorers, Imagined Landscapes

Tonje Bøe Birkeland blends fiction and photography in a body of work that reimagines the explorer’s narrative. Her self-portraits depict fictional female adventurers navigating vast Nordic landscapes — barren mountains, endless tundras, icy seas. These images, part of her ongoing Characters series, question who gets to be remembered in the history of exploration. Birkeland constructs costumes, journals, and relics for each character, blurring reality and myth. Her photographs remind us that women’s stories have often been erased from grand narratives, and she invites us to reconsider what it means to conquer, to wander, to endure. Birkeland’s work is both intimate and epic: she inhabits the characters she invents, and in doing so, she opens new spaces for women in the mythos of discovery. Her images not only reframe the landscape but challenge the gaze through which history is written, offering a poetic intervention into the visual language of adventure.