Your Eyes in My Head/Sunday Without Love

Two installations explore listening and reflection: Laurie Anderson lets us slip into someone else’s mind through binaural headphones, while Ragnar Kjartansson’s video work obsessively repeats a fragile chorus. 

Laurie Anderson - Your Eyes In My Head

The American artist Laurie Anderson is a pioneer of multidisciplinary art and has played a key role in the development of interdisciplinary performance, in which image, sound, text, and technology converge. Her work has profoundly influenced generations of artists and remains highly relevant within the international art world.

Her installation Your Eyes in My Head is a new work that will have its world premiere at the Holland Festival. Anderson transforms listening into a physical and spatial experience. The visitor steps inside someone else’s head by putting on headphones with binaural audio: a recording technique that captures sound with two microphones placed at ear distance, precisely registering subtle differences in direction, timing, and resonance. Through the headphones, a three-dimensional sound space emerges in which sound comes not only from left and right, but also from the front, behind, above, and right next to the ear. This form creates an intensely individual and intimate proximity.

Anderson’s work often moves at the intersection of voice, technology, and imagination. She uses binaural audio to guide the listener into another person’s mind. In her own words: “What would it be like to be inside someone else’s mind? Even just for a minute?” In Your Eyes in My Head, this begins with an MRI machine mapping a head. From there, the listener follows a stream of thoughts, sounds, and inner movements: the humming, singing, counting, drifting away, trying to forget, trying to begin again.

The 3D audio renders these mental movements tangible. Voices may whisper right beside the ear, circle around the head, or disappear like a thought slipping away. Everyday sounds - chewing, a heartbeat, brushing teeth, breathing - become audible as if they were inside the listener’s own body, while other sounds open up like spaces: trains, rooms, distant voices, memories that flare up and fade again. She explores how thoughts emerge, derail, or attempt to stay on course. Who is listening, and from which perspective? “And in this land of the body, who are we? Who’s talking to who?”

Ragnar Kjartansson - Sunday Without Love

Sunday Without Love is inspired by a mid-twentieth century postcard, hung on Kjartansson’s fridge, depicting a scene of people wearing matching folk costumes in a nameless location and, incongruously, one of them holding a jazz guitar. Kjartansson, along with nine other performers, donned outfits to mimic this postcard and performed a fragile chorus on repeat in a similar idyllic, pastoral setting.

The music was adapted by Kjartansson and frequent collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson from “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen,” a 1996 comedic song by German artist Rocko Schamoni. Set against the backdrop of the quiet, and deeply European countryside, the lyrics, “You must learn to live without love,” disrupt the bucolic mood with a feeling of tragic longing, endings, and stoic resignation. In a confluence of references from classical pastoral painting to traditional romantic ballads, the work evokes a portrait of unrequited love as well as a Buddhist sense of acceptance. The video Sunday Without Love was produced from a performance commissioned by TRANSART25, that was originally presented in Renon, Italy in September 2025. 

The Icelandic artist Kjartansson belongs to the same generation as associate artist Hildur Guðnadóttir. His practice is deeply influenced by the comedy and tragedy of classical theatre, often creates works imbued with the personal as well as irony and ambiguity. Repeatedly threading through his works, and evidenced in Sunday Without Love, are seemingly oppositional sentiments - humor with sincerity, romance with melancholy - that intertwine in a nuanced balance of contradictions and concordances. A defining characteristic of Kjartansson’s oeuvre is an ability to be at once empathetic and sardonic towards these strong emotions, and to simultaneously embrace the profound and the sincere while holding it at a distance. 

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Ragnar Kjartansson, Sunday Without Love, 2025

Single-channel video, duration 19 minutes and 14 seconds 

Music by Davíð Þór Jónsson and Ragnar Kjartansson, based on lyrics and music by Rocko Schamoni

Video commissioned by Sigurður Gísli Pálmason

The video Sunday Without Love was produced from a performance commissioned by TRANSART25, that was originally presented in Renon, Italy in September 2025.

Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik