Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious: Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

Ragnar Kjartansson's major solo exhibition, Politics of the Obvious, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in New York will mark the American museum debut of a number of important works. The exhibition centers on a series of deceptively simple refrains, clichés, and truisms. In six installations created over the span of more than two decades, Kjartansson transforms familiar phrases or gestures into experiences that become altogether strange, provocative, and powerfully moving.

Notable video installation works on view include Kjartansson's most recent work, Sunday Without Love (2026), No Tomorrow (2017), The Visitors (2012), and six videos from the series, Me and My Mother (2000–25), among others. Additionally, taking place every day during the museum's open hours, will be a live performance of Bangemand / Scaredman (2023). In this piece, a man in a tuxedo inches along a narrow ledge high on a gallery wall, his body pressed anxiously against the wall. The performance evokes a familiar cultural script in which masculinity is cast as under siege, transforming a familiar archetype into a meditation on fear, spectacle, and the troubling logic that power sustains itself by staging its own vulnerability.

Presented together, the works in Politics of the Obvious describe a world in which aspiration and anxiety are tightly bound, and the quest for stability, beauty, and tranquility are shadowed by a persistent sense of precarity.