The Visitors

"The Visitors" is a monumental nine-channel video installation by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, filmed in a single continuous take at Rokeby Farm, a historic estate along the Hudson River in upstate New York. Across nine simultaneously projected screens, Kjartansson and a group of musician friends each occupy a separate room of the sprawling mansion — or the surrounding grounds — performing a haunting, slowly building musical composition based on a poem by the artist's ex-wife, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. Over the course of sixty-four minutes, the separated performers gradually converge into a shared crescendo before spilling out of the house and walking together into the surrounding fields, merging their individual voices into one.

Commissioned by the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich and jointly acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the work has become one of the most celebrated artworks of the twenty-first century. The Guardian ranked it number one on its list of the greatest artworks since 2000. Drawing on themes of togetherness and separation, intimacy and distance, "The Visitors" transforms the act of communal music-making into a deeply moving meditation on human connection, the passage of time, and the bittersweet beauty of shared experience.