Death is Elsewhere

Sigur Rós have given a dozen film makers the same modest budget and asked them to create whatever comes into their head when they listen to songs from the band's album Valtari. The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom. These 16 films are the result. Sad, funny, beautiful and, occasionally, plain bewildering, they represent just some of the available emotional responses to this most contemplative album.

Widow Chloe travels to Japan for work where she is welcomed by an old friend, Toshi. Sliding between the melancholy of loss and the awe of perspectives changed, Chloe wanders an unfamiliar landscape where love has carved all the guiding grooves.

A celebration of creativity, community, and friendship, The Visitors (2012) documents a 64-minute durational performance Kjartansson staged with some of his closest friends at the romantically dilapidated Rokeby Farm in upstate New York. Each of the nine channels shows a musician or group of musicians, including some of Iceland’s most renowned as well as members of the family that owns Rokeby Farm, performing in a separate space in the storied house and grounds; each wears headphones to hear the others. As the music begins and repeats, individual players stop, start, and move between rooms. Viewed together, the individual videos present an ensemble performance Kjartansson calls a “feminine nihilistic gospel song.” The piece itself sets lyrics from a poem by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Ragnar´s ex-wife, to a musical arrangement by the artist and Icelandic musician Davíð Þór Jónsson; the title comes from a 1981 album from Swedish pop band ABBA, meant to be its last.

Ragnar Kjartansson meets with American blues musician Pinetop Perkins in a field near Pinetop's home in Austin, Texas. Ragnar films Pinetop in the sunset, as he plays a piano and reminisces about his life and career.

Icelandic artist and musician Ragnar Kjartansson’s often intensely durational performance-based works manifest a rare synthesis of pathos and humor. A Lot of Sorrow is both a music video and an extended concert film, in which Brooklyn-based band the National performs its three-and-a-half minute ballad “Sorrow” on repeat for six hours. The band’s music and lyrics frequently conjure notions of romantic suffering and melancholy—themes common to Kjartansson’s emotive, theatrical work. As the hours pass and fatigue sets in, the musicians subtly alter their song; the original track is always recognizable but is also shown to be elastic and expressive rather than rigid. Kjartansson is sometimes visible in the role of roadie, offering water and food to the performers throughout the concert. Multiple camera angles grant the viewer access to both the perspective of the musicians and that of the audience, as the band and the crowd feed off each other’s energy with every repetition.

No Tomorrow is a new video installation by Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir, and composer Bryce Dessner. Spanning six screens that encircle the room, the installation surrounds viewers with a performance of spatial music written for eight dancers with eight guitars. Recorded from the center of the performers’ space, the installation is kaleidoscopic, capturing the dancers as they weave within each screen and across the channels; their movements and melodies ranging from pastorale to rock and roll. Combining a variety of classic Western references – blue jeans and white t-shirts, the draped silk curtains of mid-20th century song and dance films, as well as lyrics drawn from the Archaic Greek poet Sappho and adventurer Vivant Denon, two sensualists millennia apart – the work spins notions of idealization and iconography.

A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird features Kjartansson and his longtime collaborator, Davíð Þór Jónsson, playing a small opus they composed in a rundown, but still functioning tropically, banana plantation on a freezing winter day in Iceland.

Kjartansson appears bare-chested and buried waist-deep in a Reykjavik public park. Strumming a guitar, he plaintively sings the line—“Satan is real; he's working for me”—repeatedly for 64 minutes. As he does so, children frolic around him.

Single-channel video, 4' 54"

Sunday Without Love is inspired by a mid-twentieth century postcard that lives on Kjartansson’s fridge depicting a scene of people wearing matching folk costumes in a nameless location and, incongruously, one of them holding a jazz guitar. Kjartansson, along with nine other performers, donned outfits to mimic this postcard and performed a fragile chorus on repeat in a similar idyllic, pastoral setting. In a confluence of references from classical pastoral painting to traditional romantic ballads, the film evokes a portrait of unrequited love as well as a Buddhist sense of acceptance. [Overview courtesy of Luhring Augustine]