Ragnar Kjartansson: A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird

“It’s almost like the electricity that makes an art piece; this mystery that you cannot really access, but you feel it. If I cannot get my head around what the piece means, then I want to do it, then I think it’s interesting.” —Ragnar Kjartansson

The solo exhibition of the Icelandic installation, performance and video artist and painter Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976) A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird is displayed in the Great Hall of Kumu and in the three permanent exhibition project spaces on the 3rd and 4th floors. The display in the Great Hall focusses on the artist’s latest oeuvre: the large six-channel video installation No Tomorrow (2022, with Margarét Bjarnadóttir & Bryce Dessner), the two-channel video A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird (2025) and the series of paintings Weekdays in Arcadia, created specifically for this exhibition in Kumu. Kjartansson’s earlier video installations Mercy (2004), Variation on Meat Joy (2013) and Figures in the Landscape (2018) enter into a dialogue with the permanent exhibition of Kumu.

The exhibition, consisting of five video installations and a series of paintings, provides insight into Kjartansson’s oeuvre and its three dominant, often interrelated directions: the musical, the feminist and the art historical. Albeit highly conceptual, i.e. full of cultural connotations and quotes, it is affective, touching viewers strongly and very intimately.

In the early 2000s Ragnar Kjartansson first became known as a musician and singer. Nevertheless, he probably would not protest if we were to suggest that as an artist he is, in fact, a self-ironic country singer who—to put it sneeringly and figuratively—has been making art with a glass of whisky in his hand ever since his car broke down, while he also failed to complete any task at hand and his wife and dog left him, at the same time vigorously deconstructing the cliches of country music and colonial macho culture. The central motifs in his art are said to be love, identity, melancholia, masculinity, strength and powerlessness: befitting a country dude, one might add. Yet this simplified image is, of course, undermined and nuanced by his delving into the conventions of art history and playing with them: a subtle dialogue with the classics of feminist art and the tradition of landscape painting, black as well as musical humour, ruthless self-irony and self-criticism, and uncompromising ridicule of the (patriarchal) combination of violence and power. Although a “feminist country singer” is essentially an unlikely and definitely a contradictory combination, Kjartansson is its perfect embodiment.

According to Kjartansson, he followed the example of other musicians from a similar background by enrolling in art school, thinking that “art school is the best rock school”. It was only later that he discovered that he actually enjoyed dealing with music in the context of art, i.e. in his video installations and performances. Since the 2000s, Kjartansson has created installations that deal with the spatiality of sound and the interrelations between sound and movement. At the art academy, Kjartansson became fascinated by the history of (feminist) performance art, and it is probably fair to say that duration, repetition, slowness and routine are creative techniques that he borrowed from the radical body art of the 1960s–1970s.

Kjartansson first gained international fame in the Icelandic pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009, and his 2012 video installation The Visitors became one of the biggest hits in the art world in the 2010s. It’s safe to say that Kjartansson has been the most sought-after Icelandic, and possibly even Nordic, artist over the past decade.

Curator: Anders Härm
Exhibition designers: Anders Härm, Aleksander Meresaar
Graphic design: Tuuli Aule
Technical managers: Siim Hiis, Aleksander Meresaar, Mati Schönberg
Coordinator: Anastassia Langinen
Artist’s studio manager: Lilja Gunnarsdóttir
Artist’s technical manager: Christopher McDonald

We thank: i8 Gallery, Reykjavik and Luhring Augustine, New York