![]() When I saw the piece in Cleveland in 2015, I was overwhelmed and spent weeks thinking about it, humming a bit of the melody while picturing the artists coming together in one room at the end. Somehow, these inconspicuous images and this derivative song positively ache of longing and love, and the entire performance in its brilliant simplicity becomes a portrait on the power of nostalgic. But the triumph of it all comes from the combination of this song and the visuals. The song itself is rather unremarkable, though still admirable, feeling like a particularly long Sigur Rós track (which makes sense since a former member is one of the musicians), with other general indie influences throughout. This setup helps replicate the environment the video was recorded in, so even the simple act of moving to interact with the individual pieces creates a feeling of active participation. Above each screen is a speaker playing the audio recorded in that room, so the balance of voices and instruments shifts as you walk around. There’s Kjartansson playing acoustic guitar in a bathtub, a drummer in the kitchen, a guitarist in a bedroom that features a woman who appears to be sleeping, a cellist in another bedroom, a pianist in a dining room, and so on and so forth. ![]() They are all packed into this old mansion in upstate New York, each in different rooms, each room getting its own screen. Named for the last ABBA album, the piece consists of nine screens showing a variety of artists and musicians coming together to perform an hour-long song based on a poem written by Kjartansson’s ex-wife during their divorce. His masterpiece is his 2012 video installation entitled The Visitors. His work always focused on repetition, and he took his time, testing the limits of endurance for himself and the viewer. He was fascinated by the mundane, and began staging pieces where he would sing one line over and over or spend two days as a plein-air painter. Ragnar Kjartansson was born in Reykjavik, and went to the Iceland Academy of the Arts where he studied to be a painter before switching instead to performance art.
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