PITTSBURGH, PA.- Carnegie Museum of Art presents Ragnar Kjartansson: Song, the first solo American museum exhibition of Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976), one of Europe’s most exciting and influential young artists. The exhibition features a site-specific, long-duration live performance in the Hall of Sculpture entitled Song—newly commissioned by the museum—featuring Kjartansson’s nieces; four video works; and a one-night-only, vaudeville-style concert starring the artist, members of his family, and his friends. Kjartansson’s enthralling performances and videos, which combine sublime environments, repetition, and humor, made him a star of the 2009 Venice Biennale. Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is the 66th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series, dedicated to presenting the work of contemporary artists.

“Kjartansson’s performances and videos walk a thin line between darkness and light. The effortlessness of his romanticism and his subtle subversiveness, coupled with his gregarious charm, make Ragnar an ideal artist to enliven some of Carnegie Museum of Art’s most interesting spaces and galleries,” said Dan Byers, associate curator of contemporary art, who is organizing the exhibition.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song
Ragnar Kjartansson: Song explores Kjartansson’s artistic interests through a variety of media, all based in some way on performance. For the site-specific performance piece Song, Kjartansson’s nieces—Ragnheidur Harpa Leifsdóttir, Rakel Mjöll Leifsdóttir, and Íris María Leifsdóttir—will reside in the museum’s Hall of Sculpture for three weeks, repeatedly singing a short song that the artist wrote based on a slightly misremembered phrase from an Allen Ginsberg poem. Song evokes Kjartansson’s previous site-specific long-duration performance works such as The Great Unrest, in which the artist—dressed in Viking costume—sang for eight hours a day in a dilapidated theater in rural Iceland. Similarly, in Scandinavian Pain, Kjartansson played his guitar day after day in an abandoned barn in a region of Norway made famous by Edvard Munch. Many days, not a single human visitor would come across the performance; on one occasion, his only audience was a few cows that wandered in from the nearby field. By combining abjection with endurance, Kjartansson created an authentically Scandinavian interpretation of the blues, becoming the lonely, deep-feeling singer he was playing.

For Song, however, Kjartansson wished to abandon the brutal masculinity of Viking landscapes and suits of armor for the peacefulness of family and femininity embodied by his nieces, their voices echoing in the Hall of Sculpture as they sing the central lyric: “The weight of the world / is love.” According to Byers, Song contrasts the warmth and softness of the performers with the hard marble room, while the hall’s casts of famed classical sculptures provide a constant audience. Welcoming and alluring, the performance also verges on the hypnotic, inspiring a strange state of reverie only achieved through endless repetition.