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Ragnar Kjartansson makes performance and video works that sample a wide range of cultural productions, from the sagas of his native Iceland to American blues music. Investigating the porous boundaries between reality and fiction, Kjartansson’s song-filled performances are often inspired by misheard lyrics. His videos, often humorous, destabilize traditional readings of myth, cultural history, and authenticity. A brilliant and nimble performer, Kjartansson uses music to explore the persona of the performer, whom he frequently sets against extreme conditions. In one work, the artist and a friend play rock and roll in the heart of the wintry Canadian Rockies, and in another, he croons, bare-chested, while buried waist-deep in the ground. Kjartansson also presents what can be considered “portraits” of other performers, including his mother. The artist’s lush videos—characterized by incongruous settings, repetition, endurance, and comical or nostalgic soundtracks—evoke contradictory feelings of pleasure and anxiety, humor and sincerity, sentimentality and skepticism.

The Man is a portrait of the iconic American blues musician Pinetop Perkins (1913–2011). Born in Belzoni, Mississippi, Perkins began playing guitar and piano during the emergence of the Delta blues. Kjartansson’s portrait of Perkins participates in a century-long history of white people’s celebration, and exploitation, of the innovation and perceived authenticity of black musicians. Although the setting—an upright piano situated in a field occupied only by a vacant farmhouse—is contrived by the artist, the eccentric performance is spontaneous and unedited. Frail and perhaps experiencing dementia, Perkins repeats songs and statements in an unmediated loop. Kjartansson’s video is a dual portrait of an elderly man at the end of his life and a historically important musician who is the keeper of a disappearing tradition.

The Man uniquely joins the genres of portraiture and landscape through the use of video and song. This important work adds to the diversity of the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of video work, by artists such as Kader Attia, Paul Chan, and Christian Jankowski. The Man also contributes to the ICA’s collection of photographic work by important practitioners such as Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, and Thomas Ruff, who similarly explore and challenge long-held assumptions surrounding the traditions of landscape and portraiture.

2013.14

Ragnar Kjartansson draws on a variety of cultural sources—from American musical traditions to the landscapes of his native Iceland—to create memorable works that challenge the boundaries between reality and fiction. His videos are often humorous, placing the performer against extreme conditions. Through repetition, Kjartansson’s videos create unexpected meanings, eliciting contradictory feelings of pleasure and anxiety, humor and sincerity, sentimentality and skepticism.

The Visitors is a major video installation filmed in 2012 at Rokeby Farm located in upstate New York’s Hudson Valley. The artist and a group of musicians occupy different rooms of the rambling and opulent estate, performing a sixty-four-minute arrangement composed by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson. Displayed across nine screens, each video channel features musicians either by themselves or in groups playing instruments separately but simultaneously. Only in the installation of the work does the total musical composition form a whole. As the performers leave their individual rooms, the screens turn black until, at the end, the entire group is seen on a single screen walking away from the house through a field. The Visitors creates a uniquely layered portrait of the house and its musical inhabitants.

The Visitors was the first multiscreen video projection in the ICA/Boston’s growing collection of time-based media. The ICA has exhibited many multiscreen installations by artists such as Isaac Julien and Nathalie Djurberg and maintains a commitment to supporting this important contemporary medium. The ICA presented a traveling solo exhibition of Kjartansson’s work in 2012. The Visitors joins another video by Kjartansson, The Man, 2010, as well as major video installations by Steve McQueen and Mika Rottenberg.

2013.15

Since emerging as one of the most important video artists of the 1980s, Dara Birnbaum has used video, sound, found footage, and an array of editing and image-processing techniques to investigate the content and conventions of television and mass media.

Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is a groundbreaking early work made after Birnbaum came to attention with her first solo exhibition at Artist Space in New York in 1977. Taking what would become her signature approach, the artist drew on mass media’s vast reservoir of images and editing techniques to reveal the ideological content of television. Birnbaum constructed the six-minute video from excerpts of the television game show Hollywood Squares, isolating the participants’ expressions and gestures. When strung together and repeated, these banal looks—darting eyes, craning necks, and waving hands—reveal themselves as deeply conditioned by social codes. Presented on two cube monitors staggered in space, the installation reflects the technologies of the late-1970s period, while formally reiterating the repetition at the center of the unconscious gestures. Like much of Birnbaum’s work, Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry draws out and “talks back to” the seductive and alienating effects of mass media, especially as they inequitably implicate women.

This work by Birnbaum, one of the most important artists working in the 1980s, augments the ICA/Boston’s strong holdings of work from this period, especially those by other appropriation artists, such as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, who were part of the so-called Pictures Generation. Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry is also an early example of sculptural video work, a genre used extensively in recent years by such artists as Mika Rottenberg and Hito Steyerl, both of whom are represented in the ICA collection.

2015.33

Since the late 1990s, when Hito Steyerl became well known as an artist, writer, and filmmaker exploring the forms and potential of the experimental documentary, her work has consistently probed the power and complexity of images. Steyerl’s themes have expanded over the decade to tackle the status of images in an increasingly digital world and their relationship to the possibilities for documentary, screen culture, financial and economic systems, institutions (including the museum), networks, corporate theory, and labor. She has engaged a fascinating array of individuals as subjects and has employed increasingly sophisticated approaches to editing, digital graphics, and video installation architecture. In these formal and conceptual approaches, she is one of the most forward-thinking artists working today.

Liquidity Inc. is a beguiling post-economic crash parable of mixed martial arts (MMA) fighting, high-frequency trading, weather systems, and the liquidity of markets, labor, and information. Watching the screen while lounging on oversized beanbags, the viewer is prone and comfortable while awash in digital images of water (a main character), clouds, Hokusai, and a Lehman Brothers trader-turned-mercenary. The work’s clearest narrative arc involves Jacob Wood, who lost his job in finance during the 2008 recession and turned his hobby of MMA fighting into a new career. The film shows MMA matches, interviews with fight experts, and Wood narrating his story: “You don’t want to be frozen, that’s the kiss of death, so you’re always being liquid, and moving, whether you’re striking, faking fainting, or doing take-downs.” Liquidity Inc. employs “liquidity” as a morphing trope to describe the circulation of digital images, data, and information, financial assets, and water as resource and component of our bodies, the weather, and the shifting roles and definitions of labor in our economy. “Liquidity” is abstracted and made into an icon or a kind of mantra, the ultimate expression of economic pressures for its constant adaptability and the precariousness it produces. As importantly, liquidity becomes a means of video making, whereby Steyerl practically invents a new form, interspersing sophisticated CGI, green screen scenes, catchy music changes, and an unparalleled understanding of our contemporary syntax of embedded videos, swipes, clips, scrolls, and windows. Weather reports delivered by “terrorists” (kitsch approximations, including a little girl) refer to the popular weather forecasting website, the Weather Underground, which took its name from the 1970s radical group. Here, clouds become “the cloud” of digital storage, bound up in transnational treaties governing the security of data and the Gulf Stream of information. Steyerl serves as a radical, quick-witted commentator on the most urgent issues of our time. And she does so with a formal acuity, political creativity, and technological sophistication unmatched by her peers.

Liquidity Inc. extends the concerns of videos in the ICA/Boston collection like Christian Jankowski’s The Hunt, 1992/97, and Trevor Paglen’s Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2012, yet also forges a new path in dealing with the Internet’s influence on contemporary culture, economics, and daily life.

2015.31

In her absurdist films, Mika Rottenberg views the systems of capital through the lens of the offbeat, the exaggerated, and the gaudy. Her vision combines a penchant for the visceral, be it expressed through languid foodstuffs or bodily emanations, with a desire to express the physical realities of labor and the vexed systems by which goods are produced.

In 2014, Rottenberg travelled to the Zhuji, China, to witness the harvesting of cultured pearls––a laborious, repetitious, and undoubtedly alienating process that belies the vision of luxury, natural beauty, and ease that they evoke. NoNoseKnows provides a documentary-like account of the process, highlighting the bleak industrial urban landscapes that have resulted from the effects of the growing pearl trade in the region. The film documents the pearl production process in its entirety: irritants are inserted into young oysters to coax them into producing the pearls that later in the film are harvested by a woman crouching in a dimly lit room: she digs a sharp knife into the plate-sized mature oysters to extract a steady stream of pearls from their viscous pink interiors. At long tables supporting a seemingly unending line of bowls, rows of women sort the pearls, a blindingly quick process that gestures to the skill of the female laborers and the unremitting demand for the commodity.

Another narrative in the film is introduced by way of Bunny Glamazon, an impressively tall woman whose pantsuit suggests that she is a Western supervisor at the factory. She sits downwind of a fan activated by workers that blows the scent of flowers directly to her nose, which becomes irritated. The sneezes that follow materialize heaping plates of food on the desk where she sits. As the film cuts between Bunny’s food-producing sneezes and the oyster-producing pearls, the correspondence becomes clear—Rottenberg positions both the workers and the oysters as unwitting accomplices in an activity associated with an overabundance of capital. Rottenberg’s witty vision of human labor, and more specifically female labor, was one of the high points of the 2015 Venice Biennale, where the artist presented the film in a purpose-built room that visitors entered by way of a small re-creation of the pearl factory. NoNoseKnows (50 Kilos variant) includes the projection room and adds a 50-kilogram sack of the pearls just outside the doorway.

NoNoseKnows (50 Kilos variant) supports the ICA/Boston’s commitment to time-based media, which includes works by artists such as Kader Attia, Paul Chan, and Ragnar Kjartansson. The work expands the current holdings through its exploration of global issues and labor conditions.

2015.30

Over the past twenty years, Steve McQueen’s moving-image works have developed from his iconic silent videos to powerful sound-driven works. In his films, he establishes exquisite, visceral relationships between moving bodies and the architectural spaces that surround or confine them—relationships that are complicated by the presence of viewers in gallery spaces. Questions of politics, race, and societal traumas and conventions haunt his taut structural scenarios.

A standout in the 2015 Venice Biennale, Ashes presents footage of a handsome, young, carefree fisherman named Ashes balancing playfully on a pitching boat on one side of a screen. A second video, projected on the other side, provides the film’s soundtrack and chronicles Ashes’s unexpected fate. Some of the footage was made for McQueen’s previous project, Carib’s Leap, 2002. McQueen, who is of Grenadian descent, based Carib’s Leap on a tragic episode in Grenada’s history, when hundreds of native Caribs leaped off a cliff rather than submit to the invading French. While making that work in Grenada, McQueen met the charismatic Ashes and felt compelled to film him. Projected on both sides of the screen, the footage of Ashes is shot in grainy, lush 8mm film. Meanwhile, the footage chronicling Ashes’s fate is shot in 16mm film, which registers the scenes with factual precision. The videos conjure an easy vitality alongside the darker forces of society and destiny. McQueen has remarked, “Life and death have always lived side by side, in every aspect of life. We live with ghosts in our everyday.”

Ashes joins other works in the ICA/Boston collection that deal with the complex matrix of globalism, economy, and deeply entrenched societal problems with formal innovation, including recently acquired works by Mika Rottenberg and Kara Walker, and a group of important sculptures by Doris Salcedo. The work debuts in the US at the ICA in February 2017.

2016.02

Nalini Malani is one of India’s most prominent contemporary artists and a pioneer of video art in South Asia. She and her family became refugees in 1947 as a result of the partition of India, which divided the country along religious lines. Malani originally studied classical painting, but abandoned this tradition in the 1990s as a reaction to a growing religious fundamentalism in Indian politics. To raise political consciousness, she turned to ephemeral wall drawings, performances, experimental theater, and video installations—art forms new to India at the time—and has brought this experimental approach to her acclaimed large-scale video/shadow plays. For nearly fifty years, Malani has expressed her commitment to social activism and feminist causes in her art, which centers on themes of femininity, the body, violence, and nationhood.

The stop-motion animation Penelope is inspired by the female protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey who, to stall her suitors who press her to remarry, obsessively weaves and unweaves a shroud during her husband’s extended absence. The work depicts a monstrous figure who comes into being line by line and disappears in the same manner, visualizing Penelope’s continuous loop of stitching and unstitching by means of Malani’s consummate drawing technique.

Penelope was first shown at the ICA/Boston in the immersive exhibition Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood in 2016. Malani’s piece adds to narrative video works by Mika Rottenberg and Nathalie Djurberg that explore the modification of the female body and merge a wide array of cultural influences, as with Haegue Yang’s sculptural work, all in the museum’s permanent collection.

2016.30

2017.04

Known primarily for her large-scale video installations, white South African-born artist Candice Breitz draws from Hollywood-style filmmaking to explore identity in moving-image works and popular culture. Commissioned for the South African Pavilion on the occasion of the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, Profile (2017) features ten performers who directly address the viewer with a litany of statements that include descriptors of race, class, and gender, occupation, national belonging, and the recurring phrase “My name is Candice Breitz.” The narratives confuse the relationship between truth from fiction, as the viewer associates the statements with the speakers and attempts to organize and assign meaningful identification with each claim. Profile continues the artist’s incisive questions about race and representation, posing a critical interrogation of the possibility of conveying identity through an inherently fictitious medium, asking who can speak in the name of whom, and forcing the viewer to confront the disjunction between the artificiality of filmmaking and the perceived authenticity of film’s narratives.

800.17.02

Howardena Pindell’s oeuvre spans several decades, and her processes of destruction, reconstruction, and seriality result in complex, textured, and layered works. After graduating from Yale in 1967 with an MFA, Pindell moved to New York, where she worked for twelve years in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art, a position she left after her efforts to combat institutional and structural racism continued to be discouraged. She is best known for her labor-intensive and colorful abstract paintings and works on paper, which incorporate unique materials such as glitter and hole-punched paper. Even in her more politically charged works, the artist sustains and extends her formal interests.

After a car accident in 1979, Pindell began exploring the social and political in her work, exemplified in this intensely personal and political artwork: Free, White and 21. Facing the video camera, she provides a deadpan account of the racism she has faced as a black woman in America while placing various materials on or over her face, such as wrapping gauze around her head—perhaps a comment on her accident or on being silenced. The subversive title references both the white woman the artist plays in the film (wearing a blonde wig and sunglasses) and a catchphrase often heard in Hollywood movies of the 1930s and ’40s that conveyed a proud assertion of one’s individual liberty (and white privilege). In her pioneering essay, “Art World Racism: A Documentation” (1989), the artist confronts the issues addressed in this film, exposing exclusionary practices of institutions, informed from her perspective as an art world insider as an employee at MoMA. Free, White and 21 was first shown in Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States, curated by Ana Mendieta at New York’s A.I.R. Gallery in 1980, and was included in the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, on view at the ICA in summer 2018.

Enhancing the ICA’s collection of video works, Free, White and 21 brings a critical work by a significant artist into the collection. Furthermore, this work allows us to continue dialogues around representation and institutional racism from the past into the present.

2018.11