In a strongly visual and spatial manner, with emphasis on the experience of the viewer, Knut Åsdamutilizes sound, film, video, photography and architecture to work with the politics of space and the boundaries of subjectivity. Often these concerns are related to themes of dissidence and an analysis of space in terms of desire, usage and history. Four categories are essential to Åsdam’s work: ‘Speech’, ‘Living’, ‘Sexualities’ and ‘Struggle’:

‘Speech’: Throughout Knut Åsdam’s video, film and radio work he has been interested in how subjectivity is formed through speech acts — either through actual speech or through other forms of self-articulation — like clothes, behaviour and routines. Viewing speech as performative, he has particularly been interested in how things have to be repeated, inscribed or reinscribed with meaning to appear stable: whether that is your body or your street. In many of his works, there is a struggle of balance between the affirmative speech — that seeks to affirm a subject, and depressed speech — that seeks to dissolve the subject.

‘Living’: Åsdam is interested in architecture, place and social dynamics, not as formal exercises but rather as aspects that relates to an everyday — in which life takes place. As with the issue of ‘speech’, Åsdam is here also interested in the performative — the degree to which something’s meaning has to be repeated also opens for possibilities for change or disturbance. In Åsdam’s work there is a strong interest for the interplay of fantasy and narrative to that of lived experience and the economic and political.

‘Sexualities’: The plurality of sexual and gendered experience is at the root of the way Åsdam construct characters. The subjects in his work are always assumed as gendered and sexualized subjects. On the one hand, he is involved in the every day contestations of sexuality or gender — as it might relate to your body or to urban spaces. On the other hand, he looks at how a desiring subject is at the base of creating both the open public spaces and the enclosed or suppressed spaces in society.

‘Struggle’: Perhaps the glue that binds the other categories together, ‘struggle’ is important to Åsdam not only in a political sense, but also as a way of understanding how ‘speech’ (subject formation), ‘living’ (the meaning of the everyday) and ‘sexualities’ (the meaning of our bodies) are things we have to affirm or contest in our everyday life and that it involves both psychological and social processes.

In the 21 min award-winning film, Filter City, Knut Åsdam relates the interconnectedness and relationship between two women and the urban spaces that they inhabit and use. Through a series of carefully poised and visually striking scenes that move in a slow deep pace, the relationship between the women develops through placement and through their different use of language — where in fact they are talking to, yet past each other. The urban spaces that they use are both “theirs” to use, but also out of their economic and social control. In relation to their surrounding and in relation to each other, one character attempts but fails in adopting a searching and affirmative use of language, while the other mainly uses a depressed speech as a social medium to control her relationship.

In the installation Psychasthenia: the Care of the Self, Åsdam creates a night-time park inside the Hauptsaal of the Kunsthalle. The environment reveals a dark lush architecture of trees, plants, grass and flowers, with only minimal warm light. Here Åsdam picks up the night-time park of the city, the temporary space for teenage hangouts, drug trafficking, sexual cruising — a space that as much as it represents a temporary space of release, is also part of the very mythology and narrative of the city. Blissed, is a major new film project, premiering at the Kunsthalle Bern exploring the boundaries between narrative film and the discussion of place and space in the fine art context, utilising the thematics of friendship. The emphasis is on spatial and architectural placement and manner of language at use between the protagonists, rather than a linear story. Following a highly visual and immersive process, in Blissed, the four main characters negotiate each other and their material and social environment, in scenes that are partly structured by architecture and partly structured by language interaction. Åsdam’s objective of developing a new kind of cinema is approached by using the resources of spatial and place-oriented discourse from the Fine Arts context as a strategy within film.