detail profile ragnar kjartansson
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Ragnar Kjartansson is an Icelandic performance artist.
He engages in multiple artistic mediums throughout his performative practice.
Like video installations, performances, drawings, and paintings incorporate the history of film, music, visual culture, and literature.
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Peran Yang Di Mainkan Ragnar Kjartansson
Widow Chloe travels to Japan for...
No Tomorrow is a new video...No Tomorrow 2022
No Tomorrow is a new video installation by Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and composer Bryce Dessner. Spanning six screens that encircle the room, the installation surrounds viewers with a performance of spatial music written for eight dancers with eight guitars. Recorded from the center of the performers’ space, the installation is kaleidoscopic, capturing the dancers as they weave within each screen and across the channels; their movements and melodies ranging from pastorale to rock and roll. Combining a variety of classic Western references – blue jeans and white t-shirts, the draped silk curtains of mid-20th century song and dance films, as well as lyrics drawn from the Archaic Greek poet Sappho and adventurer Vivant Denon, two sensualists millennia apart – the work spins notions of idealization and iconography.
In this sevenchannel video installation two...
Icelandic artist and musician Ragnar Kjartanssons...A Lot of Sorrow 2013
Icelandic artist and musician Ragnar Kjartansson’s often intensely durational performance-based works manifest a rare synthesis of pathos and humor. A Lot of Sorrow is both a music video and an extended concert film, in which Brooklyn-based band the National performs its three-and-a-half minute ballad “Sorrow” on repeat for six hours. The band’s music and lyrics frequently conjure notions of romantic suffering and melancholy—themes common to Kjartansson’s emotive, theatrical work. As the hours pass and fatigue sets in, the musicians subtly alter their song; the original track is always recognizable but is also shown to be elastic and expressive rather than rigid. Kjartansson is sometimes visible in the role of roadie, offering water and food to the performers throughout the concert. Multiple camera angles grant the viewer access to both the perspective of the musicians and that of the audience, as the band and the crowd feed off each other’s energy with every repetition.
A celebration of creativity community and...The Visitors 2012
A celebration of creativity, community, and friendship, The Visitors (2012) documents a 64-minute durational performance Kjartansson staged with some of his closest friends at the romantically dilapidated Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. Each of the nine channels shows a musician or group of musicians, including some of Iceland’s most renowned as well as members of the family that owns Rokeby Farm, performing in a separate space in the storied house and grounds; each wears headphones to hear the others. As the music begins and repeats, individual players stop, start, and move between rooms. Viewed together, the individual videos present an ensemble performance Kjartansson calls a “feminine nihilistic gospel song.” The piece itself sets lyrics from a poem by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Ragnar´s ex-wife, to a musical arrangement by the artist and Icelandic musician Davíð Þór Jónsson; the title comes from a 1981 album from Swedish pop band ABBA, meant to be its last.
