Image: Hafnarhús, Reykjavík
A major work by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson is on view at Hafnarhús in Reykjavík, where Listasafn Reykjavíkur is showing ‘Heimsljós – líf og dauði listamanns’ through September 14, 2025. The museum describes the piece as a video installation from 2015 built around Halldór Kiljan Laxness’s novel ‘Heimsljós’ (1937–40), and notes that the exhibition is installed in Salur A.
The work is structured on four screens, reflecting the novel’s four books. Laxness’s story follows Ólafur Kárason Ljósvíkings, a downwardly mobile poet who never fully finds common ground with other people. In the museum’s account, the installation translates that literary structure into moving image, using the book divisions as the basis for the work’s form and sequence.
Listasafn Reykjavíkur also connects the exhibition to two anniversaries in 2025: ten years since the work was made and 70 years since Laxness received the Nobel Prize. The museum’s presentation places those dates alongside the artwork’s relationship to one of Iceland’s best-known literary figures, while keeping the focus on the 2015 work itself and its adaptation of the novel.
According to the museum, Kjartansson staged the work with a group of friends and relatives from Reykjavík’s art scene in a month-long performance at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Museum in Vienna. That performance was titled ‘Höll sumarlandsins’, and visitors were able to follow both the unfolding film and its backstage and offstage production. The resulting video work preserves that shifting relation between performance and film by showing not only the takes themselves, but also the moments immediately before and after them.
The museum says all the shots from the work’s more than eighty scenes are shown unedited, regardless of how each take turned out or how many times it had to be repeated. The result, in the museum’s description, is a kind of cubist film: a continuous but fragmented whole that touches on the epic scale of human emotions and fate.
‘Heimsljós – líf og dauði listamanns’ is also described as one of the largest works in the museum’s collection and among Listasafn Reykjavíkur’s biggest acquisitions, made possible with substantial support from a benefactor of the museum. The exhibition is listed as running from February 7 to September 14, 2025 at Hafnarhús in Reykjavík.
