Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Egress is a narrative set in a gas station in the edgelands of Oslo. The main characters work at the bottom of the oil company hierarchy and are engulfed in the everyday and the dark economic and psychological shadows of their society. Egress is the story of a young woman who deals with her every day work situation with independence and stubbornness in her work and life in the periphery of the city. The film shows relationships between control and independence, about labour, class and work, but it is also a poetic film about a socially insecure edgeland of the city—and about a psychological flipside or cost of the everyday, somewhere near the bottom of the huge economic ladder of the oil industry which secures Norway's stability. Egress' world is a world of social instability and economic insecurity as part of a society undergoing major changes. Egress is shot entirely on "location" in Oslo's Groruddalen, mainly between an apartment complex and a gas station. The film is an experimental fiction built up from documentary material which mixes the environment- and character-based to talk about contemporary society.

Knut Åsdam (1968) is a filmmaker, installation artist and photographer. Åsdam established his international work through the art scene in New York after finishing studies at Wimbledon School of Art (London, 88-89), Goldsmiths College (London, 89-92), Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht, 92-94) and at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (NYC 94-95). Expressed in diverse forms, the main interest of Åsdam’s work remains a concern for contemporary society and its psychological and material effects, and the toll of every day life; e.g. how individuals constructs and negotiates his or her identity in reaction to the rules and organizations of contemporary society. Åsdam investigates the usage and perception of public urban spaces, including their structures of political power and authority. The themes in Åsdam’s work can be thought of relating to four essential categories; ‘Speech’, ‘Living’, ‘Sexualities’ and ‘Struggle’. These concerns often relate to themes of dissidence and to analysis of space in terms of desire, usage and history. The idiosyncrasy of Åsdam’s approach to the cinematic field is created by transposing the resources of spatial and place-oriented discourses from the Fine Arts context into film. Furthermore, he uses a plotless narrative and an oscillation between documentary and fictional narrative elements in the films. Åsdam´s work has been shown widely at i.e. Tate Modern; Bergen Kunsthall; Tate Britain; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Venice Biennial; Kunsthalle Bern; Istanbul Biennial; FRAC Bourgogne; MACRO, Rome; Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; Manifesta7; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; P.S.1 MOMA, NYC: and Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among others.