To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!

Pictures from an exhibition by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson.

The publication of this catalogue and collection of texts accompanied the large-scale group exhibition To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! , held at GES-2 House of Culture from December 4, 2021 to February 27, 2022. The exhibition, curated by Ragnar Kjartansson and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, was part of the House of Culture’s Santa Barbara. How Not to Be Colonised? thematic season that explored the ways in which contemporary Russian culture has been shaped since the 1990s.

The catalogue’s title—To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! —refers to a phrase famously repeated by characters throughout Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in which Moscow becomes a metaphor for the pursuit of beauty. The exhibition To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! was structured as a musical composition, in which the effect of each piece of art was enhanced through formal or substantive consonances. This highly personal collection of artworks explored a number of issues that had preoccupied Ragnar Kjartansson for many years: the pursuit of the unattainable (the German concept of Sehnsucht), the frightening power of art (the stories of the attacks on Ilya Repin’s painting Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan on 16 November 1581), the Santa Barbara TV series as a historical narrative, the potential of cohesive creative communities, and the story of beauty, to name only a few.

The exhibition was structured as a dialogue between Kjartansson’s own works and those of artists that had greatly influenced him, among them Olga Chernysheva, Theaster Gates, Roni Horn, Elizabeth Peyton, Carolee Schneemann, Emily Wardill, and many others.