A man in a tuxedo is on a cornice with his back to the wall. The subject is a well-known Hollywood cliché: Is he running away? Is he falling? As always with the world-renowned Icelandic artist, Ragnar Kjartansson, Bangemand is as much a self-portrait as it is a bid for a distillate of the ongoing debates about masculinity, power and privilege. The performance with Bangemand was created for Louisiana's exhibition with Kjartansson in 2023 , Epic Waste of Love and Understanding.
Kjartansson's emotional and political commitment to the world is reflected in the works. They contain his loving, humorous and critical dialogue with Western culture – our self-understanding, successes, clichés, failures, melancholy, confusion, hope and absurdities. Nuanced reflections on masculinity appear in both work and exhibition in a thematic range from existential pain to aggressive world politics, which also includes the Danish colonialization of the artist's homeland, Iceland.
The works oscillate ambiguously precisely between the existential and political seriousness and the pop lightness. With Kjartansson, you usually have to both cry and laugh. The tension between tragedy and comedy is the artist's signature – for example in the work Me and My Mother from 2015, which many will know from Louisiana's collection.
At Louisiana, the exhibition with Ragnar Kjartansson follows on from major presentations by other main figures in the contemporary art field of multimedia practices, where performance, video, sound and other media are united, e.g. Marina Abramović, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg and Arthur Jafa.
See all designs with Ragnar Kjartansson
Sizes: Small, Medium and Large
Material: Certified organic cotton, fair trade
Color: White
Design: Ragnar Kjartansson/Louisiana
Model: Ragnar Kjartansson T-shirt, Scared Man