Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson has been pushing the boundaries of what multidisciplinary art can mean since his entry into the art world in 2000, a left turn from his initial aspirations to become a ‘rockstar’. Kjartansson transposes sensibilities and techniques from one medium into another, creating artworks that seem to land in the liminal space between them.

This is evident in the multidisciplinary artist’s play with time, where ‘paintings’ are sometimes 24-hour video installations of performers moving within a painted set and where ‘performance art’ could be a sound sculpture created by playing a song on repeat for six hours. The Kumu Art Museum in Estonia highlights Kjartansson’s unconventional oeuvre with a solo exhibition titled A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird. Like the artist's practice, the exhibition is concerned with the body and its materiality in art, foregrounding endurance and repetition and contrasting the reality of modern life with the romantic ideals that undergird it.

Kjartansson initially worked as a musician in various electro/pop/rock bands, an approach which is integral to his highly collaborative artistic practice. He has created work with his parents, who worked in theatre, as well as with his former wife, Icelandic artist and musician Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, who wrote the poem Feminine Ways—featured in Kjartansson’s lauded installation, The Visitors (2012).

In Estonia, the exhibition’s titular artwork, A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird (2025), created with contemporary artist and musician Davíð Þór Jónsson, continues in this vein. The two-channel video installation shows both artists performing at a banana plantation built in 1951 in an optimistic new Icelandic Republic, finally free of Danish rule. The curator at the museum, Anders Härm, described the significance of this postcolonial thread in a conversation with STIR: “Historically, Estonians and Icelanders have a lot in common—we both have a historic Viking culture, peasant heritage and have lived a long time under colonial rule, Iceland under Danish rule and Baltic-German rule in Estonia”. The greenhouse, which is now part of the horticulture department at South Iceland College, was part of the country's postcolonial effort to resist its hostile climate and produce and export fruit, particularly bananas. In persistently dim Nordic daylight, surrounded by manmade greenery, the musicians perform a song infused with yearning. The lyrics consist of quotes from a letter by the Canadian writer Anne Carson, which in turn references Kafka, Empedocles and a Yoruba funeral song.

This bricolage of references is typical of Kjartansson’s work—often using the iconography of beauty, pastoral life and particularly masculinity to question the ideals they symbolise. In the immersive six-channel video installation No Tomorrow (2022), iconic Western references are thrown together – in a room inspired by early sound cinema and rococo paintings, eight female dancers wearing blue jeans and white t-shirts play acoustic guitars in careful, synchronised movements inspired by ballet and the Body Art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. The 30-channel sound shifts from folk to rock and roll and simple melodies while referencing sources like 18th century novels and verses by the Greek poet Sappho. No Tomorrow is made with American musician Bryce Dessner (who is part of the Grammy-winning rock group, The National) and choreographer Margarét Bjarnadóttir.

American artist Carolee Schneemann inspires another video installation in the art exhibition, Variation on Meat Joy (2013). Kjartansson plays on the performance artist’s 1964 film, Meat Joy, which shows eight underwear-clad performers moving in sync across a plastic tarp, rubbing raw meat and paint onto their bodies. Kjartansson's take features actors in aristocratic garb in a lavish dining room, eating steak, the sounds of their chewing intentionally amplified. Although more polite than Schneemann's work, Kjartansson maintains the same interest in the carnal and its sublimation.

Juxtaposing the grand with the mundane is a strategy the video artist often uses. His 2018 series Figures in Landscape features seven 24-hour-long video installations, each depicting a different theatrical set, hand-painted to depict archetypal natural settings like deserts and forests. Performers wearing lab coats move listlessly amid the scenery. Kjartansson employs musical rhythm and repetition to adapt Romantic paintings depicting nature and man’s mastery over it into contemporary art, where passive and mundane human figures are juxtaposed against natural settings.

In a new series of landscape paintings, Weekdays in Arcadia (2025), Kjartansson explores romanticised notions of pastoral life. “It was...Ragnar's first reaction to the space. ...It all started from his personal experience as a shepherd in Iceland,” said Härm about the new commission. Named after the Arcadians—ancient Greek shepherds—the series depicts everyday life in the Skaftártunga region of South Iceland. Specifically, it shows the artist and landowners from his community herding sheep, the result of a still-standing 13th century law requiring inhabitants of the area to help gather sheep for one week each autumn. Small figures in yellow vests and ATVs roam the landscape, exposing the everyday reality, labour and technology concealed by the pastoral genre.

A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird draws viewers into Kjartansson’s rich and self-reflective web of references. It draws attention to concealed societal ideals as it vacillates between the beautiful and the everyday, and the absurd and the sincere.

‘A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird’ will be on view from May 16 - September 21, 2025, at the KUMU Art Museum.