the european biennial of contemporary art
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artists

Knut Åsdam

1968, Trondheim, NO Lives in Oslo, NO

Oblique, 2008 Video installation, 35 mm film to HD video, 20’

ROVERETO

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Urban environments and their heterotopic sites are the locations for Åsdam’s investigations into social design, patterns of behavior and modes of subjectivity, with a particular focus on the disorder and pathology of spatial identity. Åsdam perceives a city as a machine of desire. Its structures of political power and authority occupy a central place in the artist’s quasi-anthropological studies of perplexed identities. Oblique is a hybrid narrative of cinema and architecture, quoting public or semi-public spaces within a city, building up a labyrinthine setting within the gallery space. The film is an articulation of identity in transition: the artist invites the viewer on a journey through a continuous “city” built up from various cities, regions and landscapes with diverse political, economic, cultural and social features. The characters in Oblique are traveling in a suspended, generic space, in-between the realities of various places. Åsdam animates representational systems and orders of belonging. This helps to map out cross-regional tensions where complex identity factors need to be negotiated. It also expresses the struggle between the desire to feel at home within a language and the necessity to adapt to social changes. The artist provides narratives for those spaces with an intense psychological charge – newly built peripheral zones of cities, construction sites, institutional and office buildings, transitory places – but at the same time, he constructs a subjective site of political urgency.


Location

ROVERETO

ADAM BUDAK: "PRINCIPLE HOPE"

EX PETERLINI, VIA SAVIOLI 20 – MANIFATTURA TABACCHI, P.ZZA MANIFATTURA 1 -STAZIONE FERROVIARIA, PIAZZALE ORSI, I-38068 ROVERETO, ITALY

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