Ragnar Kjartansson: Time Changes Everything

World premiere of new Ragnar Kjartansson video installation at De Pont
From September 17, 2022, De Pont presents Time Changes Everything, a unique survey exhibition by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (Reykjavik, 1976), with new works including the world premiere of his major video installation No Tomorrow (2022). This will be the first solo show in the Netherlands by this internationally renowned artist, and the largest ever exhibition at De Pont. Time Changes Everything will encompass the full diversity of media in Kjartansson’s body of work, with a balance of well-known and new installations.

No Tomorrow is an immersive installation, the product of a collaboration between Ragnar Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and composer Bryce Dessner. The visitor is surrounded by six large screens showing eight young women, dressed in jeans and white T-shirts, strumming acoustic guitars as they circle around, as if forming some ethereal, translucent carousel of meticulously constructed choreographies. Any boundary between space and time seems to fade away as the music becomes the dance, and the dance, the music. The work incorporates a song based on extracts from the 18th-century novella No Tomorrow by Vivant Denon and fragments from the work of the Ancient Greek poet Sappho. The installation evokes simultaneous associations with 1940s song-and-dance films and Kjartansson’s favorite painter, Antoine Watteau.

“In No Tomorrow we play with classic motifs of Western culture in an attempt to create a new way of making music and a new way of presenting it. Using the movements of the dancers to create music and a 30-channel sound and 6-channel video installation to project it into the exhibition space. It is also a wondering on  our ideals of beauty, our search for beauty and the absurdity of its representations, inspired by the frivolity and reality of rococo paintings, classical ballet and song and dance films. The performers all played a major part in creating this piece with us; it is a portrait of them and their art.” —Ragnar Kjartansson.

Woman in E
Besides No Tomorrow, the exhibition encompasses work from all phases of Kjartansson’s artistic career, including videos (one being Me and My Mother, which De Pont acquired in 2020), installations, paintings, sculptures, sketchbooks, and graphics. The museum’s main hall will be the venue for the spellbinding 2016 performance work Woman in E, in which a woman wearing a sparkling golden dress stands on a rotating dais, repeatedly strumming an E-minor chord on an electric guitar. The E-minor chord is universally associated with melancholy, and exceptionally well-suited for the expression of wistful feelings and brooding heartache. Woman in E will be performed in the main hall continuously for the duration of the exhibition.

Another work made especially for the exhibition by the artist, working in collaboration with the Eindhoven studio Fabrique Céramique, is Guilt and Fear (2022), an installation comprising 1,000 porcelain salt and pepper shakers in the form of neoclassical monuments, painted with the words GUILT and FEAR and displayed in a single extended configuration in a series of cabinets.

The exhibition curators of Ragnar Kjartansson: Time Changes Everything are Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and Maria Schnyder.

The press preview is on Friday, September 16, at 12pm. The artist will be present. Rehearsals for the performance Woman in E will be taking place during the preview. If you wish to attend, please register by sending an email to pressoffice@depont.nl. Limited spaces are available.

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d.vlasblom@depont.nl / T: +31 624937971
h.zeedijk@depont.nl / T: +31 658969360

Upcoming at De Pont:
Raphaela Vogel: February 18, 2023