Contemporary Art America
ICA feature | November 9, 2026 | Buffalo
In Buffalo, Ragnar Kjartansson lets the refrain change
At the Buffalo AKG, Politics of the Obvious turns familiar gestures into something less stable: a holiday, a song, a man trying not to fall.
Repetition can make a scene reassuring. It can also make the scene begin to unravel. Ragnar Kjartansson's Politics of the Obvious, open at the Buffalo AKG since September 4, works in that interval. Six installations made over more than two decades turn simple gestures and familiar cultural scripts into things that ask for sustained attention.
The museum places two sharply different versions of ease and unease alongside one another. In Scenes from Western Culture (The Boat), an elegantly dressed couple repeatedly sets off across calm water. The image has the polish of a holiday promise. In Bangemand / Scaredman, a tuxedoed performer inches along a narrow ledge high on a gallery wall during the museum's opening hours. Formal dress offers no protection from the awkwardness of a body trying to stay in place.
The contrast matters more than a neat explanation of either work. One scene stages leisure as a destination; the other makes composure visibly hard to maintain. Both depend on an image we recognize before we have fully considered it. Giving that image time exposes how much aspiration, fear and habit it contains.
The Visitors approaches the collective from another direction. Musicians perform in separate rooms of a worn upstate New York house, their individual parts becoming a shared refrain across a nine-channel video installation. Separation is built into the work, but so is the possibility of hearing across it. The museum's account also follows time passing through the repeated encounters in Me and My Mother.
This is an exhibition whose format is part of its argument. Moving images, sound and live performance do not offer the same kind of encounter as a single still. A scene can remain outwardly simple while our relation to it changes. That is the reason to allow the work more than a passing glance: the familiar may not stay familiar for long.
Politics of the Obvious
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Jeffrey E. Gundlach Building, Floor 1, Buffalo
September 4, 2026 to January 31, 2027
Show details and source images: Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Further exhibition context. Checked November 9, 2026.
This is a source-based ICA feature, not a report of an in-person visit. Exhibition descriptions are grounded in the linked venue texts; the interpretive framing is ICA America's.