REYKJAVÍK.- i8 Gallery is presenting Ragnar Kjartansson’s Soap Opera, a video work that comprises 81 restaged episodes of the American soap opera Santa Barbara which soared in popularity in 1990s Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and Belarus and became a vital cultural touchstone after the Soviet Union fell. Now exhibited for the first time, Kjartansson’s Soap Opera was filmed on-site from 2021-22 at Russia’s V-A-C Foundation’s GES-2 House of Culture, which resided in a former power plant reimaged by architect Renzo Piano in the centre of the capital city.

Kjartansson held the inaugural exhibition at the GES-2, which opened to the public in December 2021 after four years of exhibition planning. Kjartansson’s presentation was twofold: a show of multiple artists’ works cocurated by the artist and his wife, fellow artist Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, as well as a new live performance by Kjartansson: Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture. For that work, Kjartansson turned the nave of the sprawling institution into a film set, channeling a Hollywood production that museum goers could behold. Complete with professional actors, sound stages, editors, and musicians, the operation consisted of more than seventy actors and ninety crew members. As the Santa Barbara episodes were recreated in the Russian language played by Ukrainian and Russian actors at GES-2, they were simultaneously edited and shown on screens at the museum. Visitors could see the scenes being made, edited, and presented in real time; Kjartansson’s plan was to film one episode a day for 99 days in front of the live audience during the duration of his show.

The American soap opera Santa Barbara, which was created by Bridget and Jerome Dobson, began to air on Russian television in 1992, a week after the Soviet flag was removed from the Kremlin, and is the longest running show in the country’s history. In a drastic shift of culture, capitalism began to take hold as Marxism-Leninism faded, and Santa Barbara was at the centre of the change, becoming an aspirational beacon of success. It was the top-ranking TV show in Russia for much of the 1990s and shepherded in a new era of Western capitalistic culture within the country.

A photographic project by Moldovan-American photographer Misha Friedman spurred Kjartansson’s intrigue about the importance of the television show within Russia. Friedman’s images, which were published in a Foreign Policy article, captured villages that had been modeled after the soap opera’s Californian setting, with some towns even renaming themselves Santa Barbara. Friedman became a collaborator and advisor to Kjartansson during the making of the live Santa Barbara and was present during the filming of the new work. In The Brown Period, three photographs by Friedman taken between 2016-2022 will be on view.

To explore the effect of Santa Barbara on Russian psyches, Kjartansson reconceptualized the episodes as an extended performance at GES-2, with Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir directing the production in Russia. Kjartansson was raised in theatres, with his mother and father as actors, and he often works in durational, repetitive performance. Drawing upon the inherent cyclical form of soap opera plots, which rely heavily on heightened sensitivities, relationships, and situations of the characters, Kjartansson identifies Soap Opera as an “emotional sculpture.” The looping effect of the frequent dramatic scenes, a hallmark of soap operas, closely relates to Kjartansson’s use of repetition as an artistic tool.

In the artist’s version of Santa Barbara, visitors to both the film set in Russia and the video in Reykjavik likely experience a lack of clear narrative, as one enters a scene without context of the overall plot. However, drawn by the impassioned character expression, viewers can immediately immerse themselves within the drama of the scenes. Kjartansson explores the emotional manipulation shared between high-intensity theatre and soap operas, while visual art often carries more emotional ambiguity. As a live performance at GES-2, the work was sculptural; now presented in video form, it becomes painterly and further abstracted by the lack of narrative digestible to the viewer.

Confronting the nuances and moralities of making an artistic exhibition in a country rooted in governmental and cultural censorship, Kjartansson opened his presentation at GES-2 almost exactly thirty years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While avoiding overt cultural and political boycotts, his Soap Opera is infused with a rebellious spirit of subtle opposition. While originally planned as 99 episodes, the final episode, the 81st, was filmed at GES-2 on 24 February 2022, the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, as Kjartansson cancelled the remainder of the show. The production of Kjartansson’s show at GES-2 is the subject of a documentary directed by Gaukur Úlfarsson titled Soviet Barbara: The Story of Ragnar Kjartansson in Moscow.