Ragnar Kjartansson Makes the Familiar Strange at Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Observer ·
"Politics of the Obvious," part of the AKG Art Museum's initiative devoted to art from the Nordic region, centers on works that stretch familiar gestures until hidden scripts appear. Two decades of Kjartansson’s video, performance and music reveal how fragile masculinity, capitalism and our own convictions really are.
Many of the behaviors that make up our routines are, in fact, social rituals we have seen repeated around us and gradually absorbed. It begins in childhood, as we watch our parents and imitate their actions while learning to navigate our own experiences. As life goes on and our social circle widens, we absorb from peers and teachers, from people on the street and, today, from media. Before a behavior feels instinctive, it has often been rehearsed, consciously or not. Children imitate parents; adults imitate social roles, romantic codes, gender performances, professional etiquette and even ways of expressing grief or happiness.
Artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s work has long focused on repeating behaviors we know well—singing a love song, playing music together, performing masculinity, mourning, declaring affection, striking romantic poses—and stretching them until the social script underneath comes into view. His performers are often caught between genuine feeling and the visible enactment of the conventions through which that feeling is supposed to appear. Moving between melancholy and humor, beauty and absurdity, his works play with tropes familiar from art history and the movies, undermining the suspension of disbelief that lets an audience set aside logic and real-world expectations and accept the artificial world of the play.
“ Politics of the Obvious “ Artist: Ragnar Kjartansson Venue: Buffalo AKG Art Museum Address: 1285 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, NY Through: January 31, 2027
His first extensive solo museum presentation at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, “Politics of the Obvious,” gathers some of the most significant works Kjartansson has made over the past two decades, offering an in-depth look at an inquiry into social performance, embedded conventions and truisms that could hardly feel more timely, especially in the U.S.
The exhibition grew out of the museum’s acquisition of his work No Tomorrow (2022), co-acquired a few years ago with the MFA Boston, explains Cathleen Chaffee , AKG’s chief curator since September 2017, who organized the show with Helga Christoffersen , curator of the AKG Nordic Art and Culture Initiative. The show also ties into that initiative, which weaves threads between Buffalo and a Nordic art scene that otherwise rarely gets exposure in the state. Launched in 2021, at a transformational moment for the institution, the initiative grew out of former director Janne Sirén’s familiarity with the Nordic region and his sense that many artists there—despite strong domestic cultural infrastructure and, in some cases, government support—deserved a broader international stage. It also builds on the institution’s history: in 1913, the Albright Art Gallery, as the Buffalo AKG was then known, presented “The Exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art,” which had a profound impact on the development of art in North America. The initiative resonates both geographically and aesthetically in Buffalo, which shares ties to the boreal ecozone and a heightened awareness of ecological vulnerability.
Kjartansson’s themes differ, but his approach and attitude are distinctly Nordic in the subtle way he balances an unsettlingly monastic containment of high tragedy with deadpan humor, absurdity and a disenchanted contemplation of the transience of all things. His mix of beauty, darkness and understated humor resonates with broader tendencies across Nordic art.
When we spoke shortly after the opening, Kjartansson explained that a work usually arrives as an image rather than as a deliberate decision to investigate a social phenomenon through anthropological or sociological observation. He compared the process to blues songs that give shape to an emotional concern. “They’re dealing with something in my heart that I’m trying to deal with, and it comes out like this. But at the same time, I just find the human condition—our condition—very interesting,” he said.
Hovering between extreme theatricality and an irony that addresses the real paradoxes and squalor of contemporary society, Kjartansson’s scenes are often so deliberately artificial that when he first presented Me and My Mother , his mentor and teacher, Dutch artist Aernout Mik , sharply criticized it because the acting was visible and therefore, in his view, unconvincing.
The entire first room is given over to the work in its successive versions. Restaged every five years, from the first, made while Kjartansson was still in art school, to the most recent, the videos lined up across the room register roughly 25 years of repetition of the same ritual. In the obsessive repetition of a scene many would find disturbing, we watch mother and son age and see their relationship shift from pure performance toward a more contained meditation on role-play within that frame, as within any family dynamic.
The instruction is brutally simple: Kjartansson asks his mother to spit on him, with disgust. A professional actress, she summons that emotional state by imagining people she despises, while he tries to remain recognizably himself, stoic yet betraying chagrin and a frightening sense of exposure. The work confronts one of the most deeply embedded social clichés, the belief that a mother’s love is unconditional, endlessly nourishing and infallible. It also challenges notions of masculinity, as Kjartansson’s reaction reveals the inherent fragility a man can feel before his mother.
Watching the work evolve over the years, we understand how Kjartansson turned that early criticism into a founding principle: a work can reveal its fiction, staging and artifice and still function emotionally. The visibility of the construction may be precisely what makes the emotion powerful. Unlike Hollywood’s traditional investment in suspension of disbelief and in hiding the “strings,” Kjartansson lets viewers see the mechanisms and still be devastated by what they produce. “We’re just so fragile. I’ve always been interested in that,” he said, adding that his practice developed partly through studying feminist art and its attention to power, gesture and the objectification of people.
The point becomes even clearer in another highly choreographed, artificial work, Sunday Without Love , in the room to the left. Here, Kjartansson, guitar in hand and in period dress, repeats a simple anti-love line from a German rock or punk song against a carefully crafted idyllic set that recalls Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte , albeit in a far more mundane, kitschy register, complete with ladies in period costume lingering by the lake, children playing on lush green grass and a bucolic landscape all around. To stage this tableau vivant, Kjartansson searched across Europe for the right landscape and the right outfits, yet he had no interest in hiding incidental contemporary details such as a telephone pole—an indifference to seamless illusion rooted in that formative critique from art school.
The lyric is a familiar pop-rock cliché—love hurts, love is poison—but sung over and over with extraordinary beauty, it grows increasingly devastating, becoming an elegy for the fact that everything one loves will eventually be lost.
“I work with the cliché quite a lot because I think those are most often for people the main source of truth, and the more people establish it, the truer it becomes,” he said, recalling a work by Icelandic artist Magnús Sigurðarson that depicted its maker naked, with a cigar and a finger up his backside, titled The Cliché Is the Ultimate Expression . “There was something hilarious and mystical about it. When you’re learning and trying to find your footing in art, you’re trying to avoid clichés. But somehow, no, it’s all there in the cliché. The cliché is so freaking interesting.”
As in other works, the scene’s darker, more disturbing undercurrents keep its first-glance beauty from becoming merely seductive, pushing viewers to question the narrative and the social and psychological dynamics unfolding before them. “The piece works with a very ironic, nihilistic statement. But it’s presented with the most beauty I can possibly create,” he said, noting how this lends the narrative a strange warmth. “This brutal truth is wrapped in warmth, and then something I find interesting happens.”
As Chaffee noted during our visit, beneath many of Kjartansson’s immersive, visually gorgeous works lies a sinister or dark underlayer, but he always turns it around to show how darkness and light coexist in the absurdity of our existence. “I am just totally in awe of the world and all its mystical beauty and mystical violence,” he reflected, describing the wonder he feels before the world’s contradictions.
At one point in our conversation, Kjartansson recalled a Christmas when his father, drinking cognac and smoking a cigar with him, offered what he presented as life’s most valuable lesson: “Suddenly, he said, ‘Ragnar, I’m going to teach you the most valuable life lesson: It’s beautiful and sad to be a human being.'”
The show’s central room holds a work from the series Scenes from Western Culture , centered on a man, a woman and a motorboat—another cliché of Hollywood and countless romantic narratives. Over a roughly two-and-a-half-hour performance, the man repeatedly arrives by boat with a beautiful woman; they kiss, she leaves, he departs, and the scene begins again. To further play with illusion, the performance is not a short loop but a continuous staging, made possible by twin actresses and a second boat that ferries one of them back outside the frame.
The dockside scene condenses the fantasy of vacation, leisure, beauty, wealth and privilege: the kind of image that might hang in a travel agent’s office, sustaining the promise that work will eventually be rewarded with escape. It is one of capitalism’s key fantasies, making labor and the time devoted to it emotionally tolerable through the promise of something far more enjoyable to consume later. In Kjartansson’s signature method, he takes a familiar image and repeats it until viewers begin to ask why the scene exists, why they recognize it so quickly and what such “constituent fictions” are doing for or to them. Seeing it again and again ideally leads the viewer to question the narrative and symbolic structures beneath the scene, and what lies beyond and before the frame.
His work remains intentionally open, offering multiple points of entry and interpretation. This is even more evident in No Tomorrow , born of a commission for a ballet the artist received despite having no conventional choreographic background. His starting image was a ballerina with a guitar. He challenges the notions of femininity and grace stereotypically associated with ballet by dressing his performers in white shirts and blue jeans, giving them a more masculine presence. Behind them hangs a curtain drawn from the Gene Kelly film Anchors Aweigh , playing once more with recognizable theatrical artifice and Hollywood convention.
The performers dance as they play, moving in response to the music rather than to a script and flowing gracefully across the six videos of this space-embracing installation, which becomes an arena placing the viewer at the center of the unfolding scene. Working with choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and composer Bryce Dessner , Kjartansson set out to collapse the usual separation between dancers and musicians, so that the bodily act of making music and the movement of dance became a single continuous system. “It’s basically a musical opus that the dancers perform themselves, and it’s music written for dancers. It’s impossible, in a way, for musicians to play this music because it’s written for movement.” The work moves between subtle passages and more rock-and-roll moments in which strumming and bodily motion visibly merge, all of which was born from the brutality of the world while the work was in development—a world in which he felt everyone was screaming: “Somehow, we wanted to make a piece that deals with nothing, and that preserves a sense of beauty as a sort of consolation.”
Music is thus fundamental to Kjartansson’s storytelling. Many of his friends and collaborators are musicians, and music functions for him not only as sound but as a social form and a mechanism for community. It drives The Visitors , arguably Ragnar Kjartansson’s best-known work , presented in the final room and prized by critics and audiences alike. Across the nine-channel installation, his friends play in separate rooms, each performing alone while connected through the same composition. Filmed in an old mansion in Dutchess County, in upstate New York, their voices and instruments travel across the channels, forming a fragile community that exists as much through distance as through togetherness, as the performers embrace a genuine sentimentalism born of a ritual shared among longtime friends. Looking back, Kjartansson admits the work unknowingly captured the last moment of youth for that group of friends, all of whom have visibly aged since. They could not have known that this gathering would come to represent the final moment of a freer, more experimental creative life before adulthood fully set in, bringing responsibilities—family, money and more—that shattered the illusion of living indefinitely within a utopian community beyond societal pressures and economic systems.
What first appears as an ecstatic celebration of friendship and music gradually becomes another meditation on impermanence, on the temporary communities we build and on how repetition can preserve a moment even as time makes it impossible to recover. The music and visuals suggest pure beauty, but once again, they wrap a deeper, harsher truth in warmth. “It’s a consolation, and I’m also interested in the violence and absurdity of beauty,” Kjartansson said. “Beautiful things are also uncomfortable.”
Also part of the show is the performance Scared Man , AKG’s first live durational performance. A man in a tuxedo, with slicked-back hair and a red carnation boutonnière, stands terrified on a ledge, evoking the silent-film or Hitchcockian image of a formally dressed man in peril. Even the tuxedo—a symbol of class, economic power and social status, the armor of masculinity that has codified Western male identity—cannot hide the inherent fragility and fear of a man facing the universal threat of the void or of death. Because he never escapes, his fear becomes Sisyphean, even pathetic. “Being alone with the void. There’s nothing you can do,” Kjartansson said. “It’s also an exercise in pathos. This man, this figure of Western masculine power, is just pathetic there on the ledge.”
Kjartansson has created a powerful portrait that exposes not only a myth of masculinity as irreparably threatened but also a broader anthropocentric myth of human supremacy, now challenged by a world in crisis. In this sense, “Politics of the Obvious” is a pointed commentary on a Western world whose myths are in crisis, in which established standards of productivity and capitalist aspiration are bound up with a pervasive collective anxiety and a perpetually unsatisfied quest for stability, beauty and a more harmonious relationship with our surroundings, social or natural. Asked whether he remains hopeful for humanity, Kjartansson cited a Mose Allison song: “I’m now rehearsing his song, which is like, ‘I don’t worry about a thing, ’cause I know nothing’s gonna be all right.’ It’s a good line. I don’t worry about a thing because I know nothing’s gonna be all right. I’m just always hopeful.”