Me and My Mother, 2020

Me and My Mother is a core work in Kjartansson’s oeuvre. Its subject is straightforward: we see the artist and his mother standing in a living room. The image is a loving one, but takes a turn when the mother spits directly in her son’s face – and continues to do so for ten minutes. Kjartansson made an initial version of this work while in art school in 2000. Since then, he has recreated the work every five years, with his now-85-year-old mother always in the starring role. Reality and role-play merge seamlessly with one another, an aspect that has become an important artistic trademark for Kjartansson.

In the early versions, mother and son were both clearly suppressing a laugh; later, the performance became more deadpan. Before recording the piece, the artist’s mother imagined that he was one of the businessmen responsible for the Icelandic stock market crash in 2008, pretending her own son was to blame. That channelled rage is expressed by spitting. Kjartansson does not see this as an act of aggression – after all, his mother is simply helping him make a work of art.

Kjartansson grew up in a household where both his mother and father were actors and militant feminists. Within the family, humour and confrontation were natural vehicles for approaching life and art. His oeuvre reflects these formative influences. Yet he prefers to conceal political meaning beneath ‘a layer of glitter and humour’. To his mind, art should be poetry: layered, ‘juicy’ and not too literal.

The work is an ode to feminism as well. Kjartansson considers the feminist revolution to be the most significant and far-reaching change of the twentieth century. Artists such as Carolee Schneemann gave the female body a voice in art – a tradition with which he explicitly aligns himself. At the same time, the way the work centres on a mother and son is reminiscent of endurance performances by Ulay and Abramović.

But Me and My Mother is a memento mori as well. Every five years, its repetition serves as a reminder of the fleeting nature of life, as well as all the good things his mother has taught him: ‘I am lucky with my mother,’ he says.