Tallinn’s Kumu Art Museum, opened in 2006, fulfills a multipurpose role. It’s one of the biggest museums in Northern-Europe and provides a permanent historical and cultural overview of Estonian art from the 18th century, while also housing temporary exhibitions in its galleries. Duality is reflected in its name too. While Kumu is a combination of the words kunst and muuseum (art and museum), the word kumu also means response and hearsay in Estonian. Accordingly, their spaces, collections and temporary expositions are nothing short of impressive.
Featuring Ragnar Kjartansson’s six works, museum-goers are set to venture on a scavenger-hunt. His artworks of various formats are scattered through different floors and wings of the building, often distancing themselves from traditional displays of white walls and sound-proofed screening rooms.
The exhibition is named after a two-channel video installation, entitled A Boy and a Girl and a Bush and a Bird (2025). Referencing a poetic sentence of the Ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, “For already, sometime, I have been a boy and a girl, a shrub, a bird, and a silent fish in the sea”, Kjartansson plays at evolutional changes in our micro- and macro-worlds. Experimenting with spatial sound, the artist and frequent collaborator Davio Pór Jónsson perform, in their own words, a “little musical opus” on the Hveragerði banana farm in Iceland. While choosing a location that symbolizes the reclaiming of a once hostile land of Danish rule, the artists perform texts containing various existentialist references. Conceptually, the performance’s universe seems to close in on itself without providing a clear context or graspable subject, making it challenging for the viewer to hold their attention for the total duration of 44’22”.
Seemingly similarly self-indulgent, a single-channel video and the first one of many that would later become his signature of combining pop music with performative formats, Mercy (2004) is a perfect ouroboros. Situated in a side-room in the middle of the Soviet-era Estonian art display, the line “Oh why do I keep on hurting you” keeps reverberating off of the walls, sang by the artist himself in a country ensemble with slick-back hair and the Elvisian self-tortured expression. The video is over 62 minutes long, yet no seating accommodation is provided in the physical room, as if it had been clear to curators that no visitor would be able to withstand an hour of the same “hurt”.
The witty placement of the artwork about violence, oppression and the literal abuse of power utilizes a painful yet fun critical attitude, also establishing a politically charged aspect of Kjartansson’s oeuvre.
A different approach to being political, No Tomorrow, Kjartansson’s six-channel video and sound installation in collaboration with Margarét Bjarnadóttir choreographer & Bryce Dessner composer is installed in the Great Hall of the museum. The video (29’18”) plays on screens set up in a circle, emphasizing the spatial dimension of sound. Accompanied by synchronized dance movements that effect the performed sound – and vice versa – the space is filled with melodies played on guitar. The concept relies upon a very technical execution and a carpe-diem or even apocalypse-soaked title. In practice, the majority of the visitors sat on the floor during my visit, only turning their heads around to locate the source of a distinct sound. Recorded in a studio, a sterile place of action, the artwork claims a clearly non-political position for itself. As if it were a reminder that creating for the sake of it is still possible, however its quality or reception might be.
Another culmination of the artist employing art- theoretical and historical notions in his work is Variation on Meat Joy (2013), a then-live-streamed performance from the Tate Modern. It references Carolee Schneemann’s ritual performance, Meat Joy, in which Schneemann herself participated and which celebrated pleasure and the arrival of the sexual revolution of the 1960s by playing with raw fish and meat. Kjartansson’s version exchanges the symbolic for the literal, setting up a Rococo-style dining scene with actual meat plated on the tables. By adding highly sensitive microphones that amplify each chew, burp, overall human noise and cutlery movement, he created an immersive theatrical space interrupted by “real-life activities”, such as a beginning and an end to the performance. While the consumption of food does, the natural sounds of eating cause anything but joy, and balance out the celebration of sexual liberation with way less sexy behavior that is, still, inherently human.
Time is of essence throughout the exhibition. Another signature and favored format of Kjartansson, durational pieces make up the majority of the displayed works in Kumu, often preventing visitors from perceiving the works in their totality. Unlike performances that contain contingencies and can rely on the presence or lack of an audience, video works are fixed in their plot. Figures in Landscape (2018), a seven channel installation with a duration of 24 hours each has hence a fragmented effect, intended to be partially missed. As the perception itself would become another endurance performance by the viewer, the attention shifts to the fixed elements: the landscapes. The juxtaposition of natural and artificial elements, theater-set-like designs and the lab-coated people lend a romantically nihilistic read to the piece. Humans come and go, having had shaped landscapes in the name of science and progress, which results in an artificial nature as their backdrop.
The only non multi-medial artwork, entitled Weekdays in Arcadia, is a culmination of topoi in the exhibition, offering all prevalent notions for us to take away. Naturally, there is a personal aspect of the artist implied. The pastoral scenes were inspired by his own purchasing of a house and plot of land for his studio, after which he discovered that according to a 13th century law still effective in Iceland, he was required to assist in herding sheep every autumn. The vast strips of land and hills spread across large canvases in oil, depicting bucolic and harmonious scenes, winking back at the classical antiquity’s tradition. Upon closer inspection, tiny human shapes camouflaged in the landscape can be outlined, often only getting hints from their whereabouts from the the titles of the paintings. Contradicting the genre, these titles are documentarist and descriptive, dismantling the romanticized view of nature. When one has been a boy and a girl and a bush and a bird, the recognition of men’s hubris is inevitable. Kjartansson suggests that we play an Anthropocene-critical version of where is Waldo here; and I’m game.