Ragnar Kjartansson & Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir

Join us for a special conversation with Ragnar Kjartansson & Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir about Santa Barbara , A Living Sculpture, the landmark project created for GES-2 House of Culture in Moscow.

In this ambitious work, Kjartansson re-staged the iconic American soap opera Santa Barbara, a television phenomenon that shaped post-Soviet culture in the 1990s. Filmed in Russia with a full professional crew and directed by Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir, the project recreates nearly 100 episodes, each shot in a single day and in a single take, echoing both the immediacy of theatre and the ritual of repetition central to Kjartansson’s artistic language.

Through this monumental live production, Kjartansson transforms the soap opera into a dynamic sculptural environment, an ever-unfolding “living history painting.” The project explores how fiction enters collective memory, how emotions are formed through media, and how the past resurfaces within the present.

The talk will also reflect on the curated exhibition To Moscow To Moscow To Moscow that reflected a broader exploration of storytelling, theatricality, and the slippages between reality and fiction as well as the context within which the show was made, the reasons for cancelling it and the aftermath that bled the fictional melodrama into the very real drama of geopolitical events.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s work has been presented at major institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Barbican Art Gallery, Palais de Tokyo, and the Venice Biennale.

Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir’s work has been presented at less major but still pretty good institutions including the Reykjavík Art Museum; OPEN, Reykjavík; 3 137, Athens and Phoenix, Exeter. She is a longstanding member of the artist run Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavík.

The two have collaborated closely, including in the curating of To Moscow, To Moscow, To Moscow and Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia.