Ragnar Kjartansson

Me and My Mother, a key work in Kjartansson’s oeuvre, is the recording of a performance – the fifth in a series that Kjartansson began twenty years ago while at art school and which he carries out every five years in the same manner. The setting is simple: the artist and his now eighty-five-year-old mother stand next to each other in front of a bookcase. This homey and loving image flips when the mother spits directly into her son’s face and persists in doing so, without interruption, for ten minutes. As such Kjartansson invokes, in a tragicomic way, questions about the classic and stereotypical love/hate relationship between a mother and son.
Putting himself and his mother in the lead roles, Kjartansson moreover directly refers to the work of performance artists Ulay and Abramović, who made endurance and physical and psychological suffering the essence of their work. But in his mother, an actress by profession, Kjartansson also found the perfect figure fora double role. As a result reality and performance merge seamlessly, this being an element that developed into a major theme in his video works and performances.