No Tomorrow

No Tomorrow is the result of a collaboration between Kjartansson, choreographer Margrét Bjarnadóttir and composer Bryce Dessner and made its world premier in the form of a video installation in De Pont Museum in 2022 (link to exhibition). Shown on six video screens, eight performers from the Iceland Dance Company circle the viewer, strumming acoustic guitars which can be heard via a thirty-channel audio system. To enter the space is to be surrounded by a wraith-like transparent carousel of meticulously choreographed dance movements. Many of the dancers could not play the guitar beforehand and had to learn the chords along with their choreography.

Dessner, the guitarist for the rock band The National, wrote the music specifically for dancers rather than guitarists. Its rhythmic patterns echo the movements of the choreography: music becomes dance and dance becomes music. The performers wear jeans and white T-shirts – ordinary, typically Western clothing that contrasts with the lush silk drapery in the background, with the latter inspired by song-and-dance films from the 1940s. Those films used dance and music to create an orderly world of beauty and happiness in an era when, outside the cinema, ‘shit was really going to hell’. In response to a world that is once again on fire, Kjartansson wanted to create a work that exists fully in the moment and deals solely with beauty.

The title refers to Dominique Vivant-Denon’s late-18th-century French novella Point de Lendemain (No tomorrow), in which a man experiences a night of fleeting, one-time pleasure with a married woman. That narrative exudes the same rococo culture of plaisirs fugitifs (fleeting pleasures) that is reflected in Antoine Watteau’s paintings. No Tomorrow also includes a song incorporating fragments of this novella, interwoven with a line taken from lyric poetry by the Greek poet Sappho, who often wrote about desire, beauty and loss.

The video installation overwhelms the viewer with rhythm, movement, chords and ambiguous emotions. Its repetitive choreography and dreamlike melodies – varying from pastoral sounds to rock and roll riffs – make No Tomorrow a meditative experience. It is an ode to love, youth and beauty, and to the kind of fleeting moment we’d like to last forever.