Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy at NGV International

Ragnar Kjartansson once spent a week filming a group of musicians (including members of legendary Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós) playing the same aching, one-line refrain over and over inside a crumbling upstate New York mansion. Scattered through the house’s mismatched rooms – bathroom, kitchen, parlour, porch – each musician played alone into a microphone, hearing the others just through headphones, the nine feeds converging only once the tape started rolling. The result, The Visitors, has been called the best artwork of the 21st century by the Guardian. Now it’s the centrepiece of the Icelandic artist’s first major Australian survey, at NGV International.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Mercy brings together eight video and film works spanning two decades, and if there’s a single word for what unites them, it’s repetition. He grew up immersed in the theatre world – his parents both worked in the industry – and that upbringing is evident in his videos, which loop, rehearse and restage small human dramas until real feeling leaks through the artifice.

That’s most literally true of Me and My Mother, a serial provocation Kjartansson began at art school in 2000 and has returned to at five-year intervals ever since. It always consists of the same request put to his mother, the veteran actor Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir: “Spit on me.” Watching the instalments side by side conveys the awkward comedy of a mother-son relationship, equal parts performance and genuine discomfort.

Elsewhere, the mood turns stranger. In the Australian premiere of Sunday Without Love, 10 performers in matching, indeterminate folk dress work through a solemn cover of Rocko Schamoni’s comic 1996 song Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen. It’s an ensemble piece that Kjartansson says started with a kitsch mid-century postcard he kept eyeing on his fridge door. Steak (Variation on Meat Joy) stages a joyless rococo dinner party where 10 diners chew through steak in near silence, a counterpoint to Carolee Schneemann’s gleeful 1964 performance piece. And in No Tomorrow, eight guitar-playing dancers in jeans and white T-shirts turn Western pop-culture uniform into a kaleidoscopic, Busby Berkeley-indebted spectacle.

Running alongside the ticketed show is the free Children’s Play: Ragnar Kjartansson, the artist’s first exhibition made specifically for children. Kids can clamber onto a stage set, try on costumes, or sketch an elaborately laid table piled with fake food before flopping onto a mound of colourful cushions that are theirs to rearrange into whatever shapes they like.

The exhibition is a rare chance to see an artist as attuned to pop music as he is to classical theatre and painting. It is comedic, sincere and very hard to look away from.

Produced in Partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria.