Ragnar Kjartansson – The Visitors
Ragnar Kjartansson – The Visitors, 2012
Film stills: Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Galleri I8, Reykjavik
Film stills: Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and Galleri I8, Reykjavik
From December 1, 2013, the exhibition The Visitors by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson was presented in the artist run Kling & Bang gallery, Reykjavík in close cooperation with Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. The nine-channel video installation premiered in 2012 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich, followed by a highly acclaimed presentation at TBA21–Augarten and is part of TBA21’s collection of contemporary art.
Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors is a hymn to the feminine and its melancholic triumph, an incantation of friendship to the melody of romantic despair. The bohemian gathering of a group of friends and musicians in the grandiose and decaying twilight zone of Rokeby farm in Upstate New York becomes the scenery for what the artist calls a “feminine nihilistic gospel song”: a layered portrait of the artist’s friends and an exploration of musical cinema taking its title from ABBA’s last album which was marked by divorce and defeat. The Visitors will now be shown in Reykjvík, where the work is so deeply rooted. With the musicians coming from the Reykjavík music scene and the song set to lyrics assembled from poems by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, the piece becomes somewhat of a portrait of a certain generation of Reykjavík’s creative scene as well as individual portraits of the musicians. This cinematographic tableau in nine parts visualizes the performance of the profoundly melancholic tune in a long, uninterrupted, and repetitive 53-minute take:
A pink rose
In the glittery frost
A diamond heart
And the orange red fire
Once again I fall into My feminine ways
You protect the world from me As if I’m the only one who’s cruel You’ve taken me
To the bitter end
Once again I fall into My feminine ways
There are stars exploding
And there is nothing you can do
Set at the Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York, a historic house owned by the Aldrich family since 1688, which is remarkable for its nearly untouched state and elegant disrepair, The Visitors captures the long-drawn-out moment when a group of seemingly exotic invitees has taken over the noble mansion for a musical performance. The invitees have stepped out of their world and into that of Rokeby, where American history can be read from the household objects; flutes, canons, swords, books and paintings sprawled around the house, left there by individuals that have passed through the mansion over several centuries of the making of American society, tell stories of the Civil war, the Boxer uprising, World War I, the construction of Manhattan, the founding of the New York Public Library among others.
As the New York Times reported on July 21, 2010, Rokeby’s 43 rooms are home to “a colorful cast of Livingston and Astor descendants—who are struggling, sometimes with each other, to keep the house from falling down while tending to their own deeply individual destinies.” From an infatuation of its atmosphere of romantic decay and the inhabitants’ attitude to Rokeby, a yearning to document this space and a desire to make a multi screen installation of longing, The Visitors came into being. It not only documents the space and alludes to its rich history, it documents a state of being at a given moment; the state of the place and the state this group of friends are in. The nine visitors take up various spaces indoors and out—the sitting room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the veranda—each one inhabiting a separate and very distinct setting, playing various instruments and singing, as if to themselves, the piece’s chorus. It is only in the synchronization of the nine channels that the voices and instruments merge into a harmonic orchestration.
Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors is a hymn to the feminine and its melancholic triumph, an incantation of friendship to the melody of romantic despair. The bohemian gathering of a group of friends and musicians in the grandiose and decaying twilight zone of Rokeby farm in Upstate New York becomes the scenery for what the artist calls a “feminine nihilistic gospel song”: a layered portrait of the artist’s friends and an exploration of musical cinema taking its title from ABBA’s last album which was marked by divorce and defeat. The Visitors will now be shown in Reykjvík, where the work is so deeply rooted. With the musicians coming from the Reykjavík music scene and the song set to lyrics assembled from poems by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, the piece becomes somewhat of a portrait of a certain generation of Reykjavík’s creative scene as well as individual portraits of the musicians. This cinematographic tableau in nine parts visualizes the performance of the profoundly melancholic tune in a long, uninterrupted, and repetitive 53-minute take:
A pink rose
In the glittery frost
A diamond heart
And the orange red fire
Once again I fall into My feminine ways
You protect the world from me As if I’m the only one who’s cruel You’ve taken me
To the bitter end
Once again I fall into My feminine ways
There are stars exploding
And there is nothing you can do
Set at the Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York, a historic house owned by the Aldrich family since 1688, which is remarkable for its nearly untouched state and elegant disrepair, The Visitors captures the long-drawn-out moment when a group of seemingly exotic invitees has taken over the noble mansion for a musical performance. The invitees have stepped out of their world and into that of Rokeby, where American history can be read from the household objects; flutes, canons, swords, books and paintings sprawled around the house, left there by individuals that have passed through the mansion over several centuries of the making of American society, tell stories of the Civil war, the Boxer uprising, World War I, the construction of Manhattan, the founding of the New York Public Library among others.
As the New York Times reported on July 21, 2010, Rokeby’s 43 rooms are home to “a colorful cast of Livingston and Astor descendants—who are struggling, sometimes with each other, to keep the house from falling down while tending to their own deeply individual destinies.” From an infatuation of its atmosphere of romantic decay and the inhabitants’ attitude to Rokeby, a yearning to document this space and a desire to make a multi screen installation of longing, The Visitors came into being. It not only documents the space and alludes to its rich history, it documents a state of being at a given moment; the state of the place and the state this group of friends are in. The nine visitors take up various spaces indoors and out—the sitting room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the veranda—each one inhabiting a separate and very distinct setting, playing various instruments and singing, as if to themselves, the piece’s chorus. It is only in the synchronization of the nine channels that the voices and instruments merge into a harmonic orchestration.