According to Ragnar Kjartansson, the sax solo is the sixth, less familiar yet still crucial pillar of society. This definitive statement was made in email correspondence about Kjartansson’s nine-channel 2015 work Scenes from Western culture, originally inspired by the George Michael pop classic Careless Whisper. The fifty-year-old Icelander heard the song playing in a New York taxi and felt an acute sense of claustrophobia, stating that ‘everywhere you go in the world there is that solo. In Shanghai, Cape Town or Kuala Lumpur there is ‘Careless Whisper’. Western culture is so omnipresent in everything in our global structure. It is a huge block of marble hanging over us by the thread of a saxophone solo’.
Scenes from Western culture, 2015, will be on show at Kjartansson’s solo exhibition at NGV International, opening 26 June. Titled Mercy, the exhibition features eight video works ranging in duration from 3 minutes and 40 seconds to twenty four hours. It will also include new works such as Sunday without love, 2025, and No tomorrow, 2022, as well as the video installations that have come to exemplify Kjartansson’s oeuvre, The visitors, 2012, and Me and my mother, 2000–ongoing.
Kjartansson’s quip about sax solos also speaks to his fascination with pop music’s expression of our most fundamental questions – the meat and potatoes. What unfurls via song, staging and a smattering of sideways glances throughout Mercy is a traversing of the epically personal and the universally particular. Kjartansson offers his belief that, like a catchy riff, self-expression
is contagious, and in repetition lies freedom, release and a sense of collectivity.
Sunday without love, Kjartansson’s most recent work, is a nineteen-minute, single-take film, drawn from a three-hour performance staged in 2025 in the Italian countryside. The staging of the work was inspired by a postcard sent to Kjartansson and his wife, the artist and curator Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, for their daughter’s baptism. The original postcard represented a group of folksy mid-twentieth-century troubadours in a bucolic, sunny setting. Kjartansson was inspired by the ‘not-quite-rightness’ of the image – one figure playing a jazz guitar was the anachronistic element, a small detail that inspired this new work.
Sunday without love’s title and staging conjure George Seurat’s most iconic (and largest) Neo-Impressionist painting, A Sunday afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–86, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection. Kjartansson’s song is a plaintive round sung by ten people who populate the tableau. Like troubadours stuck on repeat, the work swells and delivers a song of the heartbroken and lovesick. The song compels us, ‘You must learn to live, live without love / Love is not good for you’. It continues: ‘Stop all this longing / looking at stars / Stay on the ground / Hear what I say. You must learn to live/ live without love. Love is not good for you’.
Kjartansson rearranged a German comedy song from the 1990s titled ‘Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen’ (‘Learning to Live Without Love’). Though the artist’s work is often described as catharsis, this work operates as a scenic rumination. Upon further examination, Seurat and Kjartansson share some key interests, namely colour and sound in repetitive vibration and the representation of class through costume. As Kjartansson notes, ‘clothes represent power or submission’.
The performers in Sunday without love hold strong familial resonances for Kjartansson (who also appears in the work): ‘My father was a kind of political troubadour. Well, I mean, in other words, he was a protest singer. Sort of Joan Baez-like.’
The troubadour’s historical influence, from eleventh century France to the 1950s and 60s spirit of Joan Baez, is marked by secular, local references and language. These bards travelled widely, unbound by provincialism, performing in pubs and, more recently, in stadiums. Kjartansson’s work highlights the lasting impact of these musicians and encourages us to listen to their poetic and subtly political messages.
One of the earliest works in the exhibition is Mercy from 2004. In this single-channel video, Kjartansson appears as an Elvis-style crooner, standing alone with a guitar before a red velvet curtain. He sings directly to the camera, repeating the line, ‘Oh why do I keep on hurting you?’. Over the course of nearly sixty-three minutes, his tone shifts between plaintive sincerity and tongue-in-cheek playfulness. The work introduced Ragnar as a charismatic and expressive front man in his video practice, where repetition is deployed as a central device. Here, the simple musical refrain becomes a transportation device, drawing the viewer into revelry and joy while also playfully exploring the poetic cliches of heartbreak. Kjartansson’s interest in the blues, and the pop music that followed it, relies on straightforward storytelling and a steady, rhythmic sensibility. Throughout his work he uses repetition in a way that is reminiscent of religious music, pulling viewers into the work and holding their attention. ‘I was always interested in ritual’s repetition. There’s this misunderstanding that it has to be about endurance or must be really hard but, like in all religions, there is this element of getting away from the world, getting away from it all.’
Steak! Variation on Meat Joy, 2013, like Sunday without love, is a work that was originally staged as a live performance. Set in a Rococo-style dining room, ten actors, including the artist, take twenty-three minutes and eleven seconds to masticate their individual steaks and return their knives and forks to their plates. The Meat Joy of the title references American multimedia artist Carolee Schneemann’s iconic kinetic theatre performance of 1964, where the artist performs, in her words, ‘an erotic rite … that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent’:
Two of my favourite things come together in this video, the ridiculous swan-like beauty and the constantly subversive rococo and hardcore brutality of the confronting feminist movement. This work really was an ode to Carolee Schneemann and I am so proud that she kept a sketch of it, which I gave to her, on a wall in her studio.
Kjartansson often footnotes his art historical passions and artist heroes, and he has spoken of his admiration for Carolee Schneemann, linking this with growing up in the theatre, playing in bands and taking a course in feminist art history when he was at art school. About artmaking, he has said he was ‘fascinated by the fact that at the end of the day it was simultaneously a kind of show business in a way. Like a Houdini stunt. … I became interested in blending this theatrical fake world that I was raised around with the reality of performance art.’
Amita Kirpalani is NGV Curator, Contemporary Art.
This essay was published in NGV Magazine Issue 58| May–Jun 2026.