Oblique (2008) is a film by the Norwegian artist Knut Åsdam (1968).
The 13 minute film Oblique (2008) is an articulation of identity in transition. The entire film was shot on a train moving through a continuous mass built from cities and their adjoining regions. The characters are traveling in the suspended generic space of the train through regions composite of old and new economies and old and new social realities: Newly built outer areæ around the cities, construction sites, institutional and office buildings, transitory places, between growth and collapse, marked by quasi-contradictory processes of economic progress and development of slums. On the train coach itself, a targeted but sometimes absurd narrative plays itself out as a linguistic reaction to the time and place.
Urban environments, and their heterotopic sites, are locations for Knut Åsdam's investigations into social design, patterns of behavior and modes of subjectivity, with a particular focus on spatial identity's disorder and pathologies. Åsdam perceives a city as a machine of desire, its geography as a system of desire and its architecture as a generator of desiring practices. Usage and perception of public urban spaces, their structures of political power and authority occupy a central place in the artist's studies of identities.
Oblique premiered for Manifesta7 in July 2008.