Ragnar Kjartansson: the Iceland connection
By Kevin Duncan
A frozen mountain lake, a grand piano, and two Icelandic artists dressed in coonskin hats recording a country and western song.
It could only happen in Banff.
A half-kilometer from shore on the snow-covered surface of Lake Minnewanka, artist Ragnar Kjartansson and musical director David por Jonsson are shooting a video installation for the 2009 Venice Biennale. “There will be separate videos on every wall,” explains Kjartansson. “It’s going to be a gallery of singing landscape paintings.”
Kjartansson is the first recipient of The Banff Centre’s Benediktson Fellowship for Icelandic Artists. Supported by the Centre’s Visual Arts, Digital Film and Media, and Audio departments, and shot entirely in Banff National Park, Kjartansson’s work, entitled The End, is the official Icelandic submission to the Biennale. In addition to the Minnewanka footage, it includes recordings of the artists with drum and bass at Bow Falls, guitar and banjo in the Tunnel Mountain forest, and electric guitar at the Hoodoos viewpoint.
“The landscape here is like a non-place. It’s almost like it doesn’t exist because it’s so ideal. It’s like Walt Disney,” Kjartansson exclaims, gesturing expansively and admitting he has become obsessed with the Rockies.
When not shooting outdoors, the duo hunkered down in the Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony, next to Canadian war poet Suzanne Steele. On one visit, she realized that her studio had a loft while theirs had a basement, inspiring the only lyrics in The End. They appear faintly around the 20-minute mark, but the words “you got the hell, I got the heaven” are present.
Although it was Banff’s “supersized” landscape that attracted Kjartansson to the project, it was the Centre’s resources and creative environment that allowed it to come to fruition as planned. “The Banff Centre is like Iceland in a way, in that there is a strong community concentrating on art and collaboration and pushing creative boundaries,” he says. “That happens a lot in small scenes. It’s hard to explain why that is. It’s just very creative. Art is what Iceland has always been good at because of this. It fits our mentality. We tried to be good at banking, but we failed big time,” he says, referring to the economic storm that washed over the tiny nation in late 2008.
Iceland became one of the earliest victims of the global economic recession when three of the country’s major banks collapsed. But Iceland’s economic loss just might be the world’s gain, as Kjartansson believes Icelandic artists have a role to play in restoring their country’s reputation.
“Iceland has always been a poor country, but it has always produced a lot of great art. It suddenly became rich, and now it’s not rich anymore. So we need to return to what is important,” he says. “Artists have just kept on doing what they do because they recognize how important our culture is and how extremely necessary it is.”
Kjartansson admits that the economic downturn can be inspirational for artists. “If you think about it, this piece is inspired by it. It’s like ‘What the hell? Where are we? How did we get here? All of a sudden we are in some crazy space and all we have is art – country music in our case,” he says with an exaggerated Alberta drawl.
A graduate of the Icelandic Academy of Arts, Kjartansson has presented his performances and related videos, installations, and paintings in exhibitions worldwide. He first garnered international attention with his contribution to the 2005 Reykjavik Arts Festival. Staging an installation in an abandoned house, he spent 12 hours a day over two weeks, strumming a guitar, singing to himself, and adding elements to the work. Iceland’s Venice Biennale committee describes Kjartansson as a “cutting-edge contemporary artist with strong roots in cultural tradition and a keen eye for the tragicomic spectacle of human experience.”
The Fellowship that brought Kjartansson to Banff was established in 2008 by Calgarians Stephan and Adriana Benediktson in honour of Stephan Benediktson’s grandfather, Stephan G. Stephansson, an early Alberta homesteader and celebrated Icelandic poet whose family home is an Alberta Historic Site. The family’s endowment was supported by the Government of Iceland, and will be used to enable one Icelandic artist working in visual or literary arts to attend a Centre residency every year.
“Stephan G. was one of those early 20th century writers we learned about in school,” says Kjartansson. Looking out the window of the Centre’s Vistas dining room, with an arm outstretched, he recites a Stephansson poem from heart, concluding with a larger-than-life laugh.
“It’s a wonderful thing, this opportunity.”
Above: Ragnar Kjartansson and David por Jonsson create a "singing landscape painting" on the frozen surface of Lake Minnewanka. Photo: Laura Vangs
