Soap Opera, an ambitious video work by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, is on view for the first time at the project space of Reykjavík’s gallery i8, i8 Grandi. The piece is a recording of Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture, a durational performance which explored immigration, class, war and power through the medium of daytime television, and took place at Moscow’s GES-2 House of Culture between December 2021 and February 2022.
Kjartansson’s original performance featured a restaged production of the American TV show Santa Barbara, which aired in Russia from 1992 to 2002, making it the country’s longest-running series. During the performance, Russian and Ukrainian actors recited the lines in Russian inside a former power station, where Ragnar Kjartansson and his team built a sprawling production complex of sets, a costume department, and an editing studio open for visitors to explore during filming.
The artist conceived the performance after reading a 2017 article by the Russian-born writer Mikhail Iossel, which delved into the soap opera’s cultural significance for residents of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. Santa Barbara, which told stories of excess and class divide through the wealthy Capwell family, was one of the first American daytime soaps to air in the former Soviet Union. Russians watched the English version daily, accompanied by subtitles, as they welcomed capitalism and a new sense of freedom.
Referencing the long-running show, Kjartansson tells The Art Newspaper: “It’s so profound, the stuff you saw there. It’s dealing with the tension of Mexicans and Americans and immigration, and the trappings of class.”
Kjartansson and director Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir planned to recreate 99 episodes of Santa Barbara, each filmed and edited in a single day to mirror the rhythm of real daytime soaps, and to match the total run of the series in Russia. However, despite originally being slated to run until 22 March 2022, the exhibition and performance halted at episode 81. Production wrapped up in Moscow on 24 February 2022, the day Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
From this point, what began as a meditation on American cultural soft power—filtered through the Russian gaze—became, in hindsight, a portrait of artistic production trapped in geopolitical conflict. Now, Kjartansson says, it feels like the appropriate time to show these 81 episodes.
“This is all about Russians imitating Americans, Russians pretending to be Americans,” he explains. “Now, America is imitating Russia, the Republican Party is very much behaving like Putin’s party…this cracking down on the media, cracking down on academia and all this stuff. It’s very similar to what happened in Russia.”
“So the level of imitation actually has not only reversed, but also it’s going in circles,” Hjörleifsdóttir adds. “Like the snake that just keeps on eating its tail.”
In a twist of fate, the final scene of episode 81 shows a character in the middle of a nightmare, dressed in a yellow button-up shirt with a blue scarf draped over her shoulder, pulling the plug of her comatose father’s life support. This use of the colours of the Ukrainian flag was, the artist says, a coincidence, but it feels poignant nonetheless. When the war in Ukraine ends, Kjartansson and Hjörleifsdóttir have no plans to resume production beyond episode 81, meaning Soap Opera will become a time capsule for the current events around which it was produced.
