Knut Åsdam

For several decades Norwegian artist Knut Åsdam (born 1968 in Trondheim, lives and works in Oslo) has worked independently and uncompromisingly with his artistic projects, and he is today considered one of the central contemporary practitioners of film and video art.
Concepts like transformation and relocation constitute a thematic framework for most of Åsdam's works. In his films and photographs, for example, relocation is about the migration of people between land areas, or about physical movement and the bodily experience of architecture in urban surroundings. Transformation is a key word in terms of social, economic, linguistic, psychological, identity-related and architectural processes of change. Underlying this is an awareness that the meaning of architecture is changeable and that it is experienced and expressed differently by different social groupings. Perhaps even more than before, the places portrayed are themselves central to the new films Abyss and Tripoli, not only as generic urban surroundings, but also with their distinct histories, demographic conditions, and architecture.