Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson's video work *Soap Opera*, a recording of the durational performance *Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture*, is on view for the first time at i8 Grandi in Reykjavík. The performance restaged the American TV show *Santa Barbara* with Russian and Ukrainian actors in Moscow's V-A-C Foundation's GES-2 House of Culture, originally planned to run 99 episodes but halted at episode 81 on February 24, 2022, the day Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.
The work matters because it transforms from a meditation on American cultural soft power in post-Soviet Russia into an unintentional time capsule of art caught in geopolitical conflict. Kjartansson and director Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir have no plans to resume production, making the 81 episodes a permanent record of the moment war interrupted creation. The piece also gains new resonance as Kjartansson draws parallels between American and Russian political developments, suggesting the imitation of power has come full circle.