Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors.

Nine screens in a dark room

The Visitors is a nine-channel video installation with sound that Ragnar Kjartansson made in 2012. It lasts 64 minutes. Nine large projections surround a dark room, each showing one person in a different room of the same house.

The house is Rokeby, an old estate in the Hudson Valley in New York State. It has belonged to one family for generations and is full of time's marks: faded wallpaper, old furniture, large rooms with a slight chill.

In each room is a musician. One at a piano. One with a cello. One at the drums. Kjartansson himself sits in a bathtub with a guitar. Each wears headphones, hearing the others without seeing them. Together they play one song in a single continuous take.

One song, many times

The song is short. Its words come from a poem by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Kjartansson's former wife. One line keeps returning, about falling once again into one's own soft habits. It sounds like self reproach and self forgiveness at once.

For more than an hour the group sings those lines again and again. Sometimes one voice, almost a whisper. Sometimes all nine rise together, thick and warm. The song goes nowhere. It circles, and each circle has a different shade.

The title borrows from The Visitors, ABBA's 1981 album. Kjartansson often uses popular music, songs familiar to the point of cliché, and repeats them until the cliché wears off and real sadness shows through. Repetition is his method: a line, a phrase, a scene performed for hours or days, until the first meaning wears away and something else appears.

Walking between rooms

In the gallery no one can see all nine screens at once. Viewers have to move. Near the piano, the piano is loudest. Step to another screen and another voice rises. Each person builds a mix of their own by the path they take.

That way of listening recalls Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials, where each step through the Turbine Hall changes the voices one hears. In The Visitors, though, the sound holds together. It is a song, and viewers walk through it as through the rooms of a house.

Many stay the full 64 minutes. Some sit on the floor. Some cry. Nothing happens on screen in the sense of a story. There are only friends making music together.

Friendship and leaving

Most of the musicians are longtime friends of Kjartansson. In some frames others sit on the porch, listening, like guests. It is a house full of people, and a house where each person is alone in a room.

Near the end, one by one, they leave their rooms. They gather and walk out together across the lawn, away from the house, still singing. The cameras in the rooms keep running. The rooms are empty now, and the music drifts back from far off.

In 2014 SFMOMA and MoMA acquired the work together and share its ownership. It leaves a feeling hard to name: joy in the friends, sorrow in knowing they will go, and something about the rooms, still there after the people have left, still holding a little of their air.