Ragnar Kjartansson (performance artist)

Ragnar Kjartansson (RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun) (born 1976 in Reykjavík) is an Icelandic performance artist.

Kjartansson was born in 1976 in Reykjavík, where he still lives today. His mother, Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, is a well-known actress in Iceland and used to perform with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, now a director and playwright. Through both of his parents professions, Ragnar was exposed to the theater from an incredibly young age. He was in and out of bands growing up, most notably as former member of the Icelandic band Trabant. He soon transferred mediums to visual art as he felt "like a poser" playing music. He began with visual art, and attended the Royal Academy, Stockholm, Sweden in 2000. He also attended the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, painting department. Here he took a course in Feminist Art - and learned about the works of Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden. This is where he found interest in blending the fake, repetitively rehearsed world of theatrics with which he was raised, and the newly found world of performance art. Since then his career has been characterized by experiments with visual art, music and theater. He works simultaneously as an artist and a musician and considers himself mainly as a performance artist. Ragnar currently lives and works in Reykjavik. His pieces are characterized by the play between contradicting feelings; sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humor…

Ragnar's work is recognized for its playful darkness, its brilliant fusion of humor and sorrow. He uses humor as a tool to disarm the audience, and allow them to approach more serious topics of discussion. Repetition is a reoccurring trait in his works, stemming from both a background in theater and in religion. The theater, repetition for rehearsal.. and religion as a repetition to bring one closer to a greater path. This is embodied through any duration pieces, repeating process across many hours, days, months, even years.

In a work entitled, "Me and My Mother" Ragnar has his mom stand in front of a recording camera and spit on him. These videos have been made every five years since his graduation in 2000.

In a 2002 work called Death and the Children, he dressed up in a dark suit and carrying a paper scythe, leading young children through a cemetery, trying earnestly to answer their questions about fate.

In his 2006 live performance Sorrow Conquers Happiness, captured in the video God, he wore a tuxedo and played the role of an 1940s nightclub crooner on a pink-draped stage with an orchestra, singing, “Sorrow conquers happiness” over and over as the music swelled. That same year, in his two-day piece The Blossoming Trees Performance, he assumed the role of plein-air painter in the mode of the Impressionists or Hudson River School artists at Rokeby Farm, a nearly 200-year-old house in the Hudson Valley.

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