Knut Åsdam Seminar

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

2:00pm – 4:00pm

KNUT ÅSDAM SEMINAR

@ Slought

Seminar with Knut Åsdam, George Baker, and Kaja Silverman

For this event, the artist discussed his latest work with art historians George Baker and Kaja Silverman. Åsdam's work has been shaped by engagements with what he calls "edgelands" - those areas at the edge of developed urban and suburban space where social and built worlds show their seams. His installation at Slought takes as its focus a neighborhood in Oslo that has become a point of intersection between a number of different social and economic forces shaping the city. The conversation put this work in the context of Åsdam's earlier work and new installations elsewhere.  

Knut Åsdam, Mellon Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, explores architecture and cinema at the conjunction of the personal, the paranoiac, and the public. His work  has been exhibited at Tate Britain, the Venice Biennale, Künsthalle Bern, the Istanbul Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Manifesta 7, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, P.S.1 MoMa, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, among other international venues. His work has recently been collected by the Tate Modern.

Kaja Silverman is the Katherine Stein Sachs CW'69 and Keith L. Sachs W'67 Professor of Art History at University of Pennsylvania, is the recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon, Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in recognition of her exemplary contributions to humanistic scholarship. 

George Baker is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, where he has taught modern and contemporary art and theory since 2003. A New York and Paris-based critic for Artforum magazine throughout the 1990s, he also works as an editor of the journal October and its publishing imprint October Books.

Slought is located at 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA.

Organized by Kaja Silverman, the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Slought and PennDesign. Support has been provided by the Mellon Foundation, International House, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, the Department of History of Art, and the Program in Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.