Ragnar Kjartansson's survey exhibition, "Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious," has opened at the Buffalo AKG in Buffalo, New York. The Icelandic artist presents six performance and installation pieces, including the nine-screen video installation "The Visitors" (2012), a work routinely cited among the greatest artworks of the 21st century.

The ARTnews review ranked "The Visitors" Number 51 on one such list; The Guardian placed it at Number 1. Fifteen years after its debut, the hour-long installation — in which melancholic Icelandic musicians and bohemian friends perform a warbled, imperfect tune in separate rooms of a mansion — has acquired legendary status. Kjartansson himself described the work to The Washington Post with characteristic modesty: "It's a bunch of Icelandic White kids being drunk in some fancy mansion and playing mediocre country."

Critics have framed "The Visitors" in presentist terms that the ARTnews reviewer rejects. The Guardian declared it "Imbued with the optimism of the Obama years"; The Washington Post wrote that it "echoes and distills our gradual, vaccine-assisted transition from prolonged isolation to summertime resumption of social life." The reviewer counters that future audiences a century from now will know none of that context, and that the work's power lies elsewhere: in its imperfect, collaborative, communal musicality, and its proof that humans are capable of more than rote correctness.

Each musician in "The Visitors" appears isolated on a single screen, like users in what the reviewer calls "iPhone-land," yearning for connection. After a cannon boom shatters these boxes, the ensemble tumbles together in a finale the reviewer compares to Tchaikovsky. In one moment, Kjartansson disrobes and uses his towel to clean spilled champagne from the wooden 19th-century floors of the Upstate New York house — a gesture of humility from a mere visitor to the house.

Beyond "The Visitors," the exhibition's other major draw is "Sunday Without Love" (2025), a tableau vivant recreation of a midcentury postcard showing a sunny Italian mountainside. In the video, a ragtag group of singers in mountain peasant regalia — led on jazz guitar by Kjartansson as paterfamilias — repeat a single chorus adapted from a 1996 German comic song: "You must learn to live. Live without love. Love is not … good for you. Stop all this longing …"

The piece begins as a sly perversion of "The Sound of Music" (1965), a joke about the hokiness of family romance. But as the performance continues, more voices, instruments, children's vocals and harps join in. The repetition becomes fresh again, and the lyrics accumulate weight. The reviewer writes that one feels "both the solitude and the solidarity of mutual romantic delusion."

The other works in the show speak, in the reviewer's words, "with sweet jest and eloquent irony," to why we cling to received ideas. "Me and My Mother" (2000–25) takes apart uncomplicated maternal love by having Kjartansson's own mother spit on him. "Bangemand/Scaredman" (2023), a live performance, literalizes the reactionary anxiety that masculinity is in peril: a man in a tuxedo tries to scale a tiny ledge hovering over the gallery. The reviewer calls it Kjartansson's most blatant work, yet one whose "thrilling banality lingers."

"Scenes from Western Culture: The Boat" (2015) sends up idyllic romance among the rich, which the reviewer judges sharper than "White Lotus."

As the exhibition title suggests, Kjartansson burrows into the obvious, tackling weather-beaten subjects: love, mothers, home, friendship, and manliness. His influences include Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramović, from whom he builds what the reviewer calls a "manic-depressive mélange," coupling art history with the pop song and the Hollywood film. The exhibition opens with Wallace Stevens's 1951 line: "Reality is a cliché, from which we escape by metaphor."

One figure looms over the show: the alternative family. Philip Larkin's dictum "they fuck you up, your mum and dad" is illustrated, the reviewer argues, by the pairing of "Me and My Mother" and "The Visitors." The review closes with a proposition: isolated daily, connected only by headphones, we still march to a shared, shifting rhythm. "So why not create — furiously, blindly, passionately?"