Wk 10 - Artist - Ragnar Kjartansson

Ragnar Kjartansson

About the Artist

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson is the son of an actress and a director/playwright, and spent much of his childhood occupying the fringes of drama rehearsals and performances. During the rehearsals, he would listen to the same lines and scenes repeated over and over. Kjartansson took great interest in how the personalities and styles of the performers changed according to the manner in which the language was delivered. This repetition, plus conditions of duration and endurance, became the framework for Kjartansson’s performance and video career.

His mother, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, is a well-known actress in Iceland and used to perform with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, now a director and playwright. Through both of his parents professions, Ragnar was exposed to the theater from an incredibly young age. He was in and out of bands growing up, most notably as former member of the Icelandic band Trabant.

He soon transferred mediums to visual art as he felt "like a poser" playing music. He began with visual art, and attended the Royal Academy, Stockholm, Sweden in 2000. He also attended the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, painting department. Here he took a course in Feminist Art - and learned about the works of Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden. This is where he found interest in blending the fake, repetitively rehearsed world of theatrics with which he was raised, and the newly found world of performance art. Since then his career has been characterized by experiments with visual art, music and theater. He works simultaneously as an artist and a musician and considers himself mainly as a performance artist. Ragnar currently lives and works in Reykjavik. His pieces are characterized by the play between contradicting feelings; sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humor…

Analysis

Kjartansson’s performances exist in three formats. They are live, disappearing as soon as they happen; recorded, performed for the camera; or made into immersive installations. In each work, there is an emphasis on the original communal activity that produced the music. Kjartansson’s pieces long for a utopia where expression is free and accessible, a revival of urban environments through conjuring ghosts of the past and channeling the primal discourse of nature. This romanticism is coupled with an expansive sense of musical history across all genres; pop, country, classical, even crooning are all likely to be played in a Kjartansson piece, tailored to a specific environment and audience.

It was Pablo Picasso who said "Everything you can imagine is real." For proof of this, look no further than the exhibition by Ragnar Kjartansson.

Kjartansson's imagination must have been running wild when he conceived of the idea for this work, Second Movement, that was displayed at London's Barbican Lakeside every weekend for the duration of the exhibition.

As part of Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition in the main Gallery, Kjartansson conceived a new work for the unique setting of Lakeside. A mirrored scene of movement and symmetry, Second Movement (2016) sees two women in quintessential Edwardian dress row a boat across the lake, embracing in a never ending kiss – a stark contrast to the surrounding Brutalist architecture.

One of the Second Movement performers, Emmanuela Lia, about her experiences during the first rehearsal and what Second Movement means to her…

"When I first applied for the role of an ‘Edwardian girl on a boat’ that the Barbican put out, I thought it was a long shot, not only because I thought my CV wasn’t filled of performance art enough to make me shortlisted but because I thought no English person would ever hire my face for that era. I was completely wrong of course and happily surprised when they did.

The next step was talking to the curator of the exhibition, Leila Hasham, so she could explain what was required and to let her know whether I thought I was capable of it.

‘A three-hour long kiss between girls in Edwardian clothes, on a boat at the Barbican lake. Is part of Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition’.

The image hit my brain like lightning. ‘This is going to be unique!"

And that’s not the only thing. What happened on that boat on the first day of rehearsals, was more than a kiss between two people of the same gender, it was more ‘shocking’ than that.

"It was a kiss between two girls that under different circumstances, not only that would never happen, but our meeting could have turned into an argument about politics or race or sexuality. Our meeting and eventually acceptance (or refusal) of one another would have been filtered through a hundred of -what now seem irrelevant- things that would get in the way of truly getting to know each other as human beings first," says Emmanuela Lia.