Ragnar Kjartansson, Say I’m Weary, Say I’m Sad (2026)
A new, durational performance by Ragnar Kjartansson and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, debuting at Goodwood Art Foundation. Unfolding over six hours, the work takes the form of a live musical performance, based on 'Jenny Kiss’d Me' (1836), a poem by the nineteenth-century English poet Leigh Hunt (1784-1859). Written as a rondeau, a form of French lyric poetry, Hunt’s poem has been reimagined as a musical composition, developed by Kjartansson in collaboration with Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the American band The National.
Overview
Kjartansson has described Hunt’s Jenny Kiss’d Me as his “gateway to poetry”, returning to it frequently in his well-thumbed copy of Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. Bringing together themes of romanticism and melancholy that are central to Kjartansson’s practice, the poem explores memory, the idealism and reverie of youth, and the passage of time. Personified as a “thief” in the poem, time also becomes a defining element of the performance through its extended duration. Through its use of duration and repetition, the work creates an elusive temporality: simultaneously suspending the viewer in the present moment and heightening their awareness of its passing.
The performance also pays homage to the poem’s author, Leigh Hunt. A complex and often controversial figure, Hunt was both a prominent poet, critic and essayist of the Romantic period and an outspoken political commentator. His reviews in The Examiner earned him numerous literary and political enemies, including the Prince Regent, whom he famously described as a fat “Adonis”, a remark which led to Hunt’s imprisonment for two years.
Staged in the Pigott Gallery, the performance takes place against the backdrop of Goodwood Art Foundation’s winter landscape and a suite of Kjartansson’s landscape paintings, Weekdays in Arcadia. Depicting Icelandic mountain scenes, occasionally populated by sheep and shepherds, the paintings draw on Kjartansson’s annual participation in a traditional sheep-gathering in southern Iceland, maintained by members of the local community.
In Kjartansson’s practice, the boundaries between artistic mediums are often blurred, allowing a work to exist in several forms simultaneously. Here, the performance takes on a second life as a video installation, presented on a 1970s-style monitor as a sculptural object. The recording of 'Say I’m Weary, Say I’m Sad' will play on a continuous six-hour loop in the Pigott Gallery, allowing visitors to encounter the performance as an artwork in its own right.