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Music as cool as it gets

Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012. Picture Elisabet Davidsdottir

Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson is set to take Perth by storm with two separate solo exhibitions in mega-productions designed to take your breath away.

The Visitors, a nine-channel tour de force requiring nine big screens synced in unison, will take over John Curtin Gallery. The video features eight musicians, including Kjartansson, whose performances are filmed in rooms in a stunning mansion in upstate New York, before gathering together outside for a stirring finale. The one-take, 64-minute performance features lyrics gathered from the writings of his former wife, Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir, a major poet in Iceland, in an ode to feminism.

Across town at Fremantle Arts Centre, the 30-minute, five-channel video The End - Rocky Mountains once again features his musician friends. Set in Canada, the group plays in the desolate, frozen wilderness as if the mountains were their audience. The exhibition also includes a selection of Kjartansson's earlier video works as well as watercolours.

At 33, Kjartansson was the youngest-ever artist to represent Iceland in the Venice Biennale, where The End showed in 2009. Together with the screening, Kjartansson presented a six-month performance where he continuously painted the same male model, occasionally strummed a guitar, and absorbed the passing moods of Venice from his studio.

It was at the Biennale where Perth Festival visual arts manager Margaret Moore first saw his work, and she has been watching his progress since. "It was stunning. He comes from a theatrical family, which has fed into his practice. Painting is his background but he's also studied feminism as well."

Speaking from Iceland, Kjartansson says The End may appear like a crazy, cinematic scenario, with its musicians playing "for" the icy tundra.

"It's just me and my good friends playing music. It was a bit like being in a frozen western because the Rocky Mountains is where they shoot all the winter scenes for westerns."

The scene is in sharp contrast to the rambling Rokeby Farm mansion in New York where The Visitors was filmed. Kjartansson says he first went to stay there in 2007. "It's a magical place because it used to belong to the Astors. It's still in that family, so all the artefacts have been there for more than a hundred years. I was always trying to make excuses to go there. I've always want to do something with this house but, on the other hand, I've always been interested in working with music as a visual art thing, and trying to visualise the feeling of music together with my friends."

He says these musicians have all been very influential in the creation of his art.

"In a sense, I wanted an excuse for us all to go to Rokeby for the week and make music, so it was almost constructed as an excuse for the experience. We all wore headphones to hear each other and we all played at the same time. We rehearsed for a week and then we had one moment to do it because it had to be shot at sunset, and in one take. I love the tension of one take."

Created in 2012, The Visitors also coincided with his divorce. With his ex-wife's permission, he says he stitched together words from her previous video works and performances. "Our marriage was falling apart but there were these words in her performances that really were profound, and sad and full of our common defeat. With these words stuck in my mind, I started writing the music. I was trying to make this kind of musical opus out of all these fragments."

If it looks as if Kjartansson uses his life as his art, he does. "It's almost too lovely, ridiculously lovely, in fact, and too good to be true, to be able to use part of your life as your art. It's very much what I do. I bring my life experience to making art," he says.

It may equally look as if Kjartansson plays into the hands of the voyeurism popular in our world today. "There probably is a connection," he says, "but the works mainly come from being raised in the theatre and being surrounded by it. I'm totally ignorant about social media. I don't use Facebook or Twitter - just emails. I'm a total old-timer when it comes to that - a sloppy voyeurist."

He sees his visually exquisite video works as a kind of sculpture. "I see it as making the music kind of freeze in time, so it's like a painting or sculpture but in a different form."

Kjartansson studied painting at the Iceland Academy of Art and soon moved towards performance art. His mother is a well-known actress in Iceland, and his father, a former actor, is a director and playwright.

Acknowledging the enormous influence of his parents, Kjartansson says he views painting as a performance. "I try to paint in the most honest way I can but to me the act of painting is like a performance. I always feel like I'm pretending to paint."

Kjartansson is set to head Down Under for the first time for the opening of both exhibitions. "I've only heard good things about Australia - totally magnificent of course. It'll be the same Western culture in another hemisphere but it's going to be weird to go to the other end of the world."

'I've only heard good things about Australia. It'll be the same Western culture in another hemisphere but it's going to be weird to go to the other end of the world.'