Ragnar Kjartansson

Icelandic artist’s epic nine-channel video is complex, intimate and deeply moving.

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In the summer of 2012, Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson gathered his musician friends together at Rokeby, a historic estate on the Hudson River in upstate New York. What began as a week-long party, culminated in The Visitors, a nine-channel video installation of an epic, single-take musical performance. 

This captivating work, named after ABBA’s 1981 album, is a haunting epitaph for our times. In 2019, The Guardian named The Visitors the best artwork since 2000. It has been presented in galleries around the world – from the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, to the Hirshorn in Washington, D.C.

Now on view at the Esker Foundation in Calgary until April 30, this immersive vision upends any traditional ideas we might hold about theatre, music, painting or even sculpture. Instead, it merges these artistic forms into a complex work that is vividly intimate and deeply moving. 

The installation is tucked inside a black box constructed within the gallery. Visitors are invited inside to witness a virtual concert presented on nine large screens. Eight screens show different rooms at Rokeby, each inhabited by a solitary musician with a preferred instrument. The ninth screen shares a view of the front porch where other friends, including the house’s owners, Ricky and Ania Aldrich, are gathered.

The endearingly shabby 43-room mansion situated amid gently rolling hills is the perfect setting for this bohemian narrative. In an interview with The Guardian, Kjartansson describes the work as “an ode to this house and the life that’s lived there.” The house, once owned by the Astor family, has passed through generations of descendants. Fittingly, the projected tableaus are reminiscent of old romantic paintings yet are also vividly realistic, showing the guests smoking, drinking and playing music. 

In one room, Kjartansson soaks in an antique tub, splashing water as he strums his guitar and sings exuberantly. The musicians, who include Kristin Anna Valtýsdóttir and her twin sister, Gyða, from the Icelandic band múm, as well as another Icelandic musician, Davíð Þór Jónsson, are in other rooms. Connected by headphones, they perform for more than an hour, the song morphing into a mesmerizing mantra, repeated until it reverberates: “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” 

Gallery visitors wander in the darkness, watching and listening. The sound is unified from the middle of the installation but fragments when you move closer to the speaker above an individual screen. The overall effect is powerful, stirring both sorrow and joy as the song swells, shifting from a melancholic fugue into a spirit-lifting gospel. 

For Kjartansson, it is a memorial to the end of his marriage to Icelandic performance artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, who wrote the lyrics. But it’s also a eulogy to youth and a celebration of friendship, community and an America before Donald Trump’s presidency. It also seems to presage the pandemic, both its tragic losses and our recent emergence from isolation into social renewal.

After the song ends, the musicians remove their headphones, exit their rooms and gather around a grand piano. Champagne is uncorked, cigars are lit, and then the ensemble jubilantly leaves the house, moving together across a lush green meadow until they fade silently into the gloaming. ■

Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 21 to April 30, 2023.

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