Christian Houge is a Norwegian photographer and artist born in 1972, based in Oslo.
For more than twenty five years he has explored the relationship between humanity and nature, addressing environmental degradation, identity, and the human shaped era often called the Anthropocene. His images pair beauty with unease, encouraging viewers to consider consequence, responsibility, and care.
In Residence of Impermanence, Houge burns taxidermy animals that he collected and repaired over seven years, staging them against handmade English wallpapers. The action works as ritual and reckoning, confronting how humans have dominated, objectified, and mythologised animals, and how reverence can slip into possession. As warming accelerates, forests burn, and species vanish, the series asks what our images of nature say about us.
By setting beauty beside destruction, he seeks to humanise nature and create a deliberate cognitive dissonance. The work protests establishment thinking and colonial attitudes while opening a spiritual register, releasing each animal from a taxidermic limbo into a last breath of light.
Houge’s work has been exhibited widely across Europe, North America, and Asia. Key venues include Fotografiska in Stockholm, the Johnson Museum in New York, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, the Museum of Photography in Los Angeles, Whatcom Museum in Washington, and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. He has collaborated with and lectured through Norwegian Embassies in Beijing, New York, Rotterdam, Prague, The Hague, and London.
He presented a TEDx talk in 2012 titled Exploring Man’s Condition Through Photography, and in 2021 received Fotografiprisen, Norway’s national photographic award. In June 2025 Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall in Arendal hosted Paradise Lost, a retrospective spanning twelve series on nature and culture. Ongoing work includes Echoes of Utopia, made with wet plate collodion to revisit the monumental memorials of the former Yugoslavia. Across projects he blends field work, mise en scène, and rigorous printmaking, using beauty to carry difficult truths about responsibility, memory, and change.
Across his practice Houge treats photography as a philosophical instrument, a way to test how beauty can bear difficult truths. He works across large format analogue processes, digital workflows, and nineteenth century wet plate collodion, selecting the medium to serve concept and subject.
Alongside exhibitions he contributes to public dialogue through artist talks, seminars, and collaborations with cultural institutions. Recent work continues his inquiry into responsibility, memory, and care, asking how images might renew attention and empathy in an age of distraction and loss.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED)
2025- Paradise Lost, Bomuldsfabriekn, Norway
2024 — Anthropo-Cen, Sølvberget, Stavanger
2024 — Anthropo-Cen, Buer Gallery, Oslo
2022 — Temple of Light, Bold Gallery, Prague
2021 — Residence of Impermanence, Berger Museum, Norway
2021 — Death of a Mountain, Buer Gallery, Oslo
2019 — Residence of Impermanence, Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm
2017 — Shadow Within/Rituals, Gulden Kunstverk, Drammen
2016 — In;Human Nature, TM51 Gallery, Oslo
2015 — Paradise Lost series, How Art Museum, Wenzhou
2015 — Paradise Lost series, Redtory, Guangzhou
2014 — Paradise Lost series, Three Shadows Photographic Art Centre, Beijing
2014 — Shadow Within/Darkness Burns Bright, Fineart Gallery, Oslo
2013 — Shadow Within, Hosfelt Gallery, San
