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
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.
To a certain extent, this show functions as a sounding box amplifying Ragnar’s work through that of other artists and vice versa. As in The Visitors—Ragnar’s legendary video installation which is also included in the show—the orchestration of different isolated voices come together in unison, modulating individuality and collectivity as a threshold, a negotiation that needs to be always active and activated.