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5/11/2001

Knut Asdam

Klemens & Grunert Inc., New York

Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert are pleased to announce the first New York solo exhibition by New York based Norwegian artist Knut Asdam.

Asdam’s work has recently been presented in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway (2001), Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland (2001), and the Tate Britain, London (2000). Large installations were also featured at the Nordic Pavilion during the 1999 Venice Biennial and at the Norwegian Pavilion of the International Biennial in Melbourne, Australia (1999). Upcoming one-person exhibitions include Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy, Gallery Tommy Lund, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany.

Asdam’s work engages with life in today’s urban environment, its narratives, politics, sounds and images. He unveils the city’s unconscious, its underlying psychological structures that effect the individual’s personality.

This first solo exhibition in New York includes the following three works:
The video installation Notes Towards a Dissipation of Desire (2001) combines photographs, drawings and moving images of protesters, the police and city architecture. The audio, a text narrated by the artist, is the main structuring device. The work deals with the search for political meaning or political desire while it hints at the limitations of political expression and the breakdown of language and a condition of apathy.

In Cluster Praxis (2000), the second audio-video installation, the audio is a narrative mix of voice and ambient soundscapes, dominated by a poetic monologue that deals with assimilation and desire dissipating into the city. The projection shows images of people dancing, colored lights flaring into the camera, inter-cut with architectural stills, a city street, music from passing cars and a building site.

Psychastenia 10 series 2, (2000-2001) is a silent architectural projection installation with images of modern and postmodern apartment buildings shot at night. The images are bleak and induce a sense of fantasy and delirium while the social references remain clear.

The works are contained within two structures of soft architecture made of curtain systems. This carries with it the sense of a set, but also that of a changing room or a confessional space. From the outside these spaces seem to conflict with the surrounding architecture, however, the curtain walls are removable and can disappear within minutes, with little or no trace.

Although Asdam’s work is deeply experiential, his use of the term Psychastenia is significant to the work. Asdam uses the term as main or subtitle for a body of work from 1996 to the present. The term refers to the dissident surrealist Roger Caillois’ 1935 essay, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia," in which the author suggests that the phenomenon of insect camouflage or mimicry should be compared to a type of schizophrenia characterized as a "depersonalization by assimilation to space. "This dynamic understanding of the boundaries between subjectivity and space is something Åsdam sees as a cultural background to his work. This affects his understanding of the body, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, politics, and architecture.

Writing about the utopian qualities of Asdam’s work, based in particular in his crucial video of 1995 Untitled: Pissing, which caused quite a stir and was featured on the cover of Artforum (Feb. 2000), George Baker coined the term "politics of the stain." He defines it as a counter-movement to a conventional understanding of space and community "as enclosure, as belonging, as the positively and productivity of the group." He continues:

Asdam’s work joins then what we might call a full-blown politics of the stain. And just as the space of the stain is hardly anything that we could think of as a traditional space, this politics of the stain will be impossible, it will not be, its lack of substance the very condition of its present necessity.

George Baker. "The Space of the Stain." In: Knut Ã…sdam (cat.), Art Now, Tate Britain, 11 July - 1 October, 2000, p. 41)

An extensive essay on Åsdam’s work is featured in the current issue of Grey Room (MIT Press). The two catalogs, Knut Åsdam, Art Now, Tate Britain, 2000, and Knut Åsdam: Notes Towards a Dissipation of Desire, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, and Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland, 2001, are available upon request.

The exhibition is supported by the Royal Norwegian Foreign Ministry and Norway 2005.

Klemens & Grunert Inc. 524 West 19th Street New York, NY, 10011 tel: 212.807-9494 fax: 212.807-6594

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