Ragnar Kjartansson and friends
03 Apr - 08 Jun 2014
RAGNAR KJARTANSSON AND FRIENDS
The Palace of the Summerland
3 April - 8 June 2014
Recently dubbed by Vogue as “Ragnar of Reykjavik”, and labeled as “ fun-loving, cigar-smoking, Cadillac-driving, highly entertaining”, Ragnar Kjartansson crosses boundaries between different media with as much ease and grace as he switches between the roles and personas he creates and personifies. In collaboration with a group of approx. 20 talented artists, musicians, and friends, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) is embarking once again on a bold new commission, one that defies traditional categorization in collaboration. Broadening the scope of its interdisciplinary and multimedia investigations, TBA21 will present a two-part project titled The Palace of the Summerland in its spectacular venue at the Augarten in Vienna.
„To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies.“ Halldór Laxness
A megalomaniac journey into the soul of a generation
From April 3 to April 27, Ragnar Kjartansson and his troupe of musicians, actors, artistic directors, costume designers, camera operators, and technical crew will live and perform continuously in the Augarten exhibition space, transforming it into an active studio, an art factory, and a set for a filmic and theatrical adaptation of the epic novel World Light (Heimsljós), by the Icelandic author and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. The Palace of the Summerland is a piece of performance art, flirting with literature, music, and sculpture—a manic journey into the souls of generations of Icelandic artists, presented under the guise of making a film. Kjartansson describes the project as a “megalomaniac quest,” in this case to capture beauty, art, emotion, and the essence of life. Aiming at the impossible, it is a task that has to be tried, completed, lived.
An epic on a softporn budget
Laxness wrote World Light between 1937 and 1940, around the outbreak of World War II. The Palace of the Summerland, named after the second part of the novel, revolves around the tragic and fateful life of its protagonist, the folk poet Ólafur Kárason, whose constant search for sheer beauty and artistic gratification leads to his final tragic apotheosis.
Kjartansson states: “This story has molded my approach to art more than anything else... It colored my whole worldview... World Light is an epic about the artist. An ironic tale of beauty and artistic integrity written in the crucible of modernism, it is equally an ode to beauty and a deconstruction of it. It speaks to an important 21st-century core: the politics of beauty. The exhibition will be the process of filming scenes from this novel, which depict the utopic creative moment, the search for perfection, and the final romanticized sacrifice for art. The exhibition space will become a Fellini-style studio, a mayhem factory for building, acting, and filming a story on beauty. We are not really making cinema; we are acting out an attempt to make cinema... It is like Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions.”
The team that the artist has assembled for this project is a robust group of some of Reykjavík’s most prominent artists, comedians, writers, and musicians. It is a gang of the friends who have inspired him in his works. Beginning in April, they will leave behind their regular lives and join Kjartansson on a Fitzcarraldo-like journey. By visiting TBA21–Augarten at different times, the public will experience diverse situations: the team caught in the middle of a rehearsal; Kjartansson with his father introducing the filming of a certain scene; musicians rehearsing a score composed by Kjartan Sveinsson, the composer and former member of Sigur Rós; the production of sets, costumes, and props: literally the entire production process in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. “It will be a factory where we are building, acting, and filming an impossibly big story on beauty. The drama is on-site. We are making an epic on a softporn budget, surrounded by the audience. It is a hopeless task. A true disaster,” says Kjartansson.
Following this four-week performance, the film/theater sets will become part of a large-scale environmental installation that will be on view at TBA21–Augarten from April 30 to June 8.
World Light
Laxness’s magnificently humanistic novel is, according to Kjartansson, the blueprint of Iceland’s artistic DNA and was frequently invoked by his father throughout his upbringing as one would cite “religious scriptures.” In the face of the indifference and contempt of those around him, the poet Ólafur Kárason, the protagonist of World Light, is driven by his sense of destiny, living a life of poverty, loneliness, death, perversity, and failed love encounters as he journeys across Iceland in pursuit of beauty, poetry, and the divine. Kjartansson and company’s adaptation crystallizes around the highly romantic but also ambiguous moments of epiphany described by Laxness. These are experiences of great beauty, inspiration, and serenity when the world comes to rest, reality crumbles, and divine and earthly revelations appear in utmost clarity. In The Palace of the Summerland, these episodes will be narrated, enacted, repeatedly rehearsed, and captured on film in one single and unique take, which will later become the filmic scenes that are an integral part of the unique work to remain on display following the performance. 81 scenes, selected by Kjartansson and his collaborators, correspond to the four parts of Laxness’s novel (Book 1: The Revelation of the Deity; Book 2: The Palace of the Summerland; Book 3: The House of the Poet; Book 4: The Beauty of the Heavens).
This collaboration in the framework of a longtime partnership between Kjartansson and TBA21 is a bold step for the institution, the artist himself, and visitors to Augarten. It has developed simultaneously with The Explosive Sonics of Divinity, a new theater piece featuring stage paintings, performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the Film Choir Berlin, premiering at the Volksbühne in Berlin starting February 19.
Kjartansson and TBA21: A long-term collaboration
Over the last nine years Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary have supported the performance career of this rising star of the Icelandic art scene. In 2005 the foundation acquired Kjartansson’s 15 Licks, a fragment from his project for the Reykjavík Art Festival that year called The Great Unrest. In 2007 TBA21 supported one of his earliest performances at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, which led to his first large production, titled God. In that project, Kjartansson with an orchestration by eleven musicians, repeatedly sings the words “sorrow conquers happiness,” delivering the melancholic message in Frank Sinatra style. Following his collaboration with the prestigious Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York and i8 Gallery in Reykjavík, Kjartansson made a series of uncompromising works that brought him considerable acclaim and recognition. Recent acquisitions include the five-channel video installation
The End in 2009, the single-channel video The Man in 2010, and finally his major 2013 work The Visitors, which featured him and fellow musicians playing a “feminine, nihilistic Gospel song” in the decayed bohemian surroundings of Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. TBA21 presented it at Augarten in collaboration with the Viennese Haydn Choir of the Wiener Sängerknaben in the spring of 2013. It is a testimony to this long-standing collaboration and support that Kjartansson has committed himself to the unique, time-consuming, and intimate project turning the elegiac Augarten space into the mythical Palace of the Summerland for an entire long long month.
About the artist
Born in Reykjavík in 1976, Kjartansson draws on the entire arc of art in his performative practice. The history of film, music, theater, visual culture, and literature finds its way into his video installations, durational performances, drawing, and painting. Pretending and staging become key tools in the artist's attempts to convey sincere emotion and offer a genuine experience to the audience. Kjartansson studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and lives and works in Reykjavík.
The Palace of the Summerland
3 April - 8 June 2014
Recently dubbed by Vogue as “Ragnar of Reykjavik”, and labeled as “ fun-loving, cigar-smoking, Cadillac-driving, highly entertaining”, Ragnar Kjartansson crosses boundaries between different media with as much ease and grace as he switches between the roles and personas he creates and personifies. In collaboration with a group of approx. 20 talented artists, musicians, and friends, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) is embarking once again on a bold new commission, one that defies traditional categorization in collaboration. Broadening the scope of its interdisciplinary and multimedia investigations, TBA21 will present a two-part project titled The Palace of the Summerland in its spectacular venue at the Augarten in Vienna.
„To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies.“ Halldór Laxness
A megalomaniac journey into the soul of a generation
From April 3 to April 27, Ragnar Kjartansson and his troupe of musicians, actors, artistic directors, costume designers, camera operators, and technical crew will live and perform continuously in the Augarten exhibition space, transforming it into an active studio, an art factory, and a set for a filmic and theatrical adaptation of the epic novel World Light (Heimsljós), by the Icelandic author and Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness. The Palace of the Summerland is a piece of performance art, flirting with literature, music, and sculpture—a manic journey into the souls of generations of Icelandic artists, presented under the guise of making a film. Kjartansson describes the project as a “megalomaniac quest,” in this case to capture beauty, art, emotion, and the essence of life. Aiming at the impossible, it is a task that has to be tried, completed, lived.
An epic on a softporn budget
Laxness wrote World Light between 1937 and 1940, around the outbreak of World War II. The Palace of the Summerland, named after the second part of the novel, revolves around the tragic and fateful life of its protagonist, the folk poet Ólafur Kárason, whose constant search for sheer beauty and artistic gratification leads to his final tragic apotheosis.
Kjartansson states: “This story has molded my approach to art more than anything else... It colored my whole worldview... World Light is an epic about the artist. An ironic tale of beauty and artistic integrity written in the crucible of modernism, it is equally an ode to beauty and a deconstruction of it. It speaks to an important 21st-century core: the politics of beauty. The exhibition will be the process of filming scenes from this novel, which depict the utopic creative moment, the search for perfection, and the final romanticized sacrifice for art. The exhibition space will become a Fellini-style studio, a mayhem factory for building, acting, and filming a story on beauty. We are not really making cinema; we are acting out an attempt to make cinema... It is like Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions.”
The team that the artist has assembled for this project is a robust group of some of Reykjavík’s most prominent artists, comedians, writers, and musicians. It is a gang of the friends who have inspired him in his works. Beginning in April, they will leave behind their regular lives and join Kjartansson on a Fitzcarraldo-like journey. By visiting TBA21–Augarten at different times, the public will experience diverse situations: the team caught in the middle of a rehearsal; Kjartansson with his father introducing the filming of a certain scene; musicians rehearsing a score composed by Kjartan Sveinsson, the composer and former member of Sigur Rós; the production of sets, costumes, and props: literally the entire production process in front of the cameras and behind the scenes. “It will be a factory where we are building, acting, and filming an impossibly big story on beauty. The drama is on-site. We are making an epic on a softporn budget, surrounded by the audience. It is a hopeless task. A true disaster,” says Kjartansson.
Following this four-week performance, the film/theater sets will become part of a large-scale environmental installation that will be on view at TBA21–Augarten from April 30 to June 8.
World Light
Laxness’s magnificently humanistic novel is, according to Kjartansson, the blueprint of Iceland’s artistic DNA and was frequently invoked by his father throughout his upbringing as one would cite “religious scriptures.” In the face of the indifference and contempt of those around him, the poet Ólafur Kárason, the protagonist of World Light, is driven by his sense of destiny, living a life of poverty, loneliness, death, perversity, and failed love encounters as he journeys across Iceland in pursuit of beauty, poetry, and the divine. Kjartansson and company’s adaptation crystallizes around the highly romantic but also ambiguous moments of epiphany described by Laxness. These are experiences of great beauty, inspiration, and serenity when the world comes to rest, reality crumbles, and divine and earthly revelations appear in utmost clarity. In The Palace of the Summerland, these episodes will be narrated, enacted, repeatedly rehearsed, and captured on film in one single and unique take, which will later become the filmic scenes that are an integral part of the unique work to remain on display following the performance. 81 scenes, selected by Kjartansson and his collaborators, correspond to the four parts of Laxness’s novel (Book 1: The Revelation of the Deity; Book 2: The Palace of the Summerland; Book 3: The House of the Poet; Book 4: The Beauty of the Heavens).
This collaboration in the framework of a longtime partnership between Kjartansson and TBA21 is a bold step for the institution, the artist himself, and visitors to Augarten. It has developed simultaneously with The Explosive Sonics of Divinity, a new theater piece featuring stage paintings, performed by the German Film Orchestra Babelsberg and the Film Choir Berlin, premiering at the Volksbühne in Berlin starting February 19.
Kjartansson and TBA21: A long-term collaboration
Over the last nine years Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary have supported the performance career of this rising star of the Icelandic art scene. In 2005 the foundation acquired Kjartansson’s 15 Licks, a fragment from his project for the Reykjavík Art Festival that year called The Great Unrest. In 2007 TBA21 supported one of his earliest performances at the Living Art Museum in Reykjavík, which led to his first large production, titled God. In that project, Kjartansson with an orchestration by eleven musicians, repeatedly sings the words “sorrow conquers happiness,” delivering the melancholic message in Frank Sinatra style. Following his collaboration with the prestigious Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York and i8 Gallery in Reykjavík, Kjartansson made a series of uncompromising works that brought him considerable acclaim and recognition. Recent acquisitions include the five-channel video installation
The End in 2009, the single-channel video The Man in 2010, and finally his major 2013 work The Visitors, which featured him and fellow musicians playing a “feminine, nihilistic Gospel song” in the decayed bohemian surroundings of Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. TBA21 presented it at Augarten in collaboration with the Viennese Haydn Choir of the Wiener Sängerknaben in the spring of 2013. It is a testimony to this long-standing collaboration and support that Kjartansson has committed himself to the unique, time-consuming, and intimate project turning the elegiac Augarten space into the mythical Palace of the Summerland for an entire long long month.
About the artist
Born in Reykjavík in 1976, Kjartansson draws on the entire arc of art in his performative practice. The history of film, music, theater, visual culture, and literature finds its way into his video installations, durational performances, drawing, and painting. Pretending and staging become key tools in the artist's attempts to convey sincere emotion and offer a genuine experience to the audience. Kjartansson studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and lives and works in Reykjavík.