Ragnar Kjartansson is interested in bringing fairy-tale situations to life, creating dreamy atmospheres that cannot be defined as surreal because they emerge from the Nordic storytelling tradition grounded in the soil of Iceland. For his first solo exhibition in Austria, Kjartansson dug into his own past, down to the roots of his existence, to examine how life can be a magical itinerary far beyond fantasy. Imagine the impact of seeing the moment of your own conception—and then imagine that it was staged in public. Reshaping it into a poetic, social rendering is an inventive solution to such an unusual, extreme scenario.

The installation Take Me Here by the Dishwasher—Memorial of a Marriage, 2011, is a hybrid work that evades definitions and categories. It is centered on a short video loop showing the artist’s real mother and father as actors in the 1977 film Morðsaga, the first feature film ever made in Iceland. A lonely housewife calls a plumber to repair the dishwasher in a risqué genre scene that the artist has recontextualized to suggest that he might have been conceived immediately afterward. Reality and fiction, public and private chase each other’s tails, the public mode defining an enthusiastic self-portrait that, somehow, seems too extravagant not to be true. The video is silent but a sound track was created in the gallery with ten live musicians scattered around the space, guitar-strumming troubadours singing a voluptuous dialogue of double entendres morphing into unambiguous randiness: Yes, here she is. Do you think she can be fixed? / Yes, I’m afraid so. / I’m desperate! / Don’t you worry. I’ll fix it. Show me what you can do. / Here? / Are you a man? / Show me what you can do to me . . . Take off my clothes! Take me, take me here by the dishwasher.

Constant repetition deprives the chorus of its meaning; it becomes a divine, meaningless mantra. Composed by Kjartan Sveinsson of the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós, it consists of ten variations on the same dialogue, but its different melodies create a harmonic whole. The multilevel architecture of the space allowed the singers to use it as a melancholic platform on which to sit, drink, smoke, and perform their three-hour-long, three-dimensional piece of live music in what the artist defines as a “spatial music concert,” something like a goofy adaptation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “spatial music” experiments: melodious, in constant flux, a self-consuming spiral.

In the gallery’s back space, Kjartansson presented The Man, 2010, a reverential portrait of the Texas blues musician Pinetop Perkins, who passed away earlier this year at the age of ninety-seven. During the unedited hour-long video, filmed with a fixed camera, the musician plays the piano outdoors in a landscape typical of the US South. He gives a restless, extempore performance, chatting, singing, and repeating himself in a superb balancing act between self-mockery and radiant musicality that provides a neat blueprint for the origins of modern pop culture. Perkins, one of the last of the original bluesmen, is such an archetypal embodiment of an era that he seems a figure of the imagination, a character in a piece of fiction. After him, a door was closed.

—Francesco Stocchi