In his second solo- exhibition at Gasser & Grunert in New York City, Knut Åsdam will present his film-installation Filter City, 2003, for the first time in the US, as well as a new series of photographs, which explore the same themes of urbanism and social space.
Knut Åsdam’s work, an acute investigation of relationships of psyche, space and politics, has been widely exhibited in institutions all over the world, from the recent presentation at the Biennial in Istanbul (Filter City) to the Venice Biennial, with important solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, London, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (Filter City). A large survey exhibition of Åsdam’s work is being organized by the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo for May 2005 and will travel afterwards.
Throughout Knut Åsdam’s work we find a continuous investigation into urbanity and subjectivity. What he has described as his interest in ’contemporary subjectivity’ encompasses the structures of the contemporary urban environment and the modes of behavior they indicate, exploring how these in turn structure the formation of subjectivity including our use and understanding of language, sexuality and gender. Here, the production of space leads to the production of (certain) subjectivities, of possibilities and impossibilities.
Indeed, the correlations between architecture and language seem to lie at the heart of Åsdam’s first foray into film, Filter City, where the protagonists negotiate their surroundings, themselves and each other through language and buildings. Life between buildings, it would seem, is a constant negotiation of a double language, spoken through the buildings and through the body. Neither seems to run smoothly, however. There are impasses, intersections, redirections, residues, surpluses, misunderstandings, as the protagonists constantly struggle to mediate and understand their (urban) condition.
In the film, Filter City, we principally follow two female characters, which inhabit public places in a specific but unspecified city over a likewise unspecified period of time. Their relation to each other is unclear, as is their social status. We see that they are hanging out on a street corner in a modern cityscape, but as we get closer the characters seem more out of place than in their place. They are obviously not teenagers and neither do they affirm any other preconceived notion of street persons; they are young women and not easily categorized either as a gang or as vagrants: They are unexplainably there. While the characters’ appearance on screen is a fluctuating signifier, their speech also shifts from narrative, vernacular dialogue to a corrosive language of theory-poetry.
The protagonists in Filter City are not so much part of a story as they are part of a spatial setting or stage. They are immersed in the space, and their agencies and subjectivities cannot be separated clearly from this space. The relationship to the city space may be antagonistic at points, but nevertheless always contingent.
The new series of photographs are, perhaps, depicting a less antagonistic relationship to urban space, although still concerned with the usages of this space by social agents; with territorializations and deterritorializations, recodings and decodings. We are again witnessing people in a space, such as parks, but once again through a certain ambiguity, deliberately avoiding any overdeterminations of the subjects in terms of belonging, class, gender relations, activities and contingencies. The subjects in the photographs – in the space – are not easily read vis-à-vis the space, but will have to be read through the spectator’s own histories and intentionalities in regards to urban spaces and occupancies. As in Filter City, Åsdam is concerned with urban transformations and structuralizations, but, crucially, also with the everyday usages and resistances of the city’s inhabitants. He is here engaged with potentialities.
-Simon Sheikh
On Thursday, February 17 at 7 pm Knut Åsdam's new book - "Speech, Living, Sexualities, Struggle" - will be launched and he will be speaking about his work at the gallery.
Opening will take place on Tuesday, January 11, 6-8 pm.
When: Tuesday, January 11 through Saturday, February 19.
Where: Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, Inc., 524 West 19th Street, NYC
Info: (212) 807-9494 or tiffany@gassergrunert.net