“The Visitors” extends its stay at Gund Gallery!

Due to an overwhelming response to the return of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors to Gund Gallery this fall, we have decided to extend it through April 3, 2022, as part of Call/Response: The Gund Gallery Turns 10.

Filmed on the location of Rokeby Farm in the Hudson River Valley, The Visitors assembles a close group of Kjartansson’s friends—artists and renowned musicians from Reykjavík and beyond—whom each contribute individual performances to a collective musical production. The title is borrowed from the 1981 Swedish pop band ABBA album. It was supposed to be the band’s last and was produced as internal strife and divorce broke up their collaboration. The lyrics to Kjartansson’s The Visitors belong to a poem by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Kjartansson’s ex-wife, combined with the musical arrangement of another artist, Davíð Þór Jónsson. In a single take, the artist’s friends perform the emotional 64-minute piece while in nine separate rooms throughout the Hudson Valley home.

The Visitors in the News:

For a more in-depth analysis of this piece and a musical interactive experience, check out this article from The Washington Post:

Revisiting ‘The Visitors’: An oral history of Ragnar Kjartansson’s multimedia masterpiece by Sebastian Smee, Gabriel Florit, and Joanne Lee

The Gund Gallery exhibitions and programs are made possible, in part, by the Gund Gallery Board of Directors and the Ohio Arts Council.

Image: Ragnar Kjartansson (Icelandic, b. 1976) Still from The Visitors, 2012. Nine channel HD video projection, Duration: 64 minutes. Photo: Elísabet Davidsdóttir, Sound: Chris McDonald, Video: Tómas Örn Tómasson. Image courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik. Gift of Graham and Ann Gund to Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, 2015.1.1.