CLEVELAND, Ohio - This is the last full week to see "The Visitors," an extraordinary video installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland that remains on view through Sunday, May 24.

A work by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, "The Visitors" documents a captivatingly oddball, hourlong musical performance amid the shabby splendor of the Rokeby mansion in New York's Hudson Valley.

MOCA, located in University Circle's Uptown district at 11400 Euclid Ave., the tip of the Euclid Avenue-Mayfield Road triangle, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursday until 9 p.m.

At a time when consciousness is slivered into so many micro-bytes, "The Visitors" rivets a viewer's attention for its full 64 minutes. It's "slow food" for the eyes, ears and the mind.

Staged on a muggy summer afternoon in 2012, the nine-channel video records the coordinated music-making of eight performers, including Kjartansson, scattered in rooms throughout the sprawling Rokeby mansion, but wired together with headphones.

Performing alone but in concert, the musicians respond to one another as they sing or chant lyrics from a text by Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir, Kjartansson's ex-wife, which speak of matters cosmic and mundane.

The video is installed in a darkened, carpeted room at MOCA in which nine screens frame the space like a series of windows into a magical world.

And just as the musicians perform separately but together as an ensemble, viewers enjoy the piece individually but also communally in a gallery that has been turned into a dark and cozy civic living room.

The Pipilotti Rist installation at MOMA in New York in 2008. MOCA Cleveland's "The Visitors" recalls the MOMA experience.

It's an amazing experience, reminiscent of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's enormous 2008 video installation "Pour Your Body Out,'' held in the interior court of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the Rist installation, viewers sprawled on a carpeted floor or a huge donut-shaped bench amid wall-to-wall psychedelic video projections of flowers, body parts and animals, flowing together in a hallucinatory sequence.

The Kjartansson video produces a similar sense of envelopment in which looking in one direction means missing something on the opposite side of the room.

Review

What's up:

"The Visitors" video.

Venue:

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.

Where:

11400 Euclid Ave., Cleveland.

Admission:

$8 general admission.

Contact:

Call 216-421-8671 or go to mocacleveland.org.

Your eye and focus tend to follow whichever performer is singing, soloing or chanting in a particularly compelling manner - the drummer in the kitchen, the bass guitarist in the library, the guitarist in the bathtub, the pianist in the ballroom.

Rokeby itself is a central protagonist in the unfolding musical drama, a setting whose crumbling grandeur enfolds the performers while providing a wonderfully anachronistic contrast to their electrified instruments, amplifiers, headphones and microphones.

Built in 1815 on a vast estate in Barrytown, a Dutchess County hamlet on the east side of the Hudson about an hour north of Poughkeepsie, Rokeby is owned by 10th-generation descendants of the Astor and Livingston families who live there more or less in genteel poverty, according to numerous published reports.

In the video, family members occupy the ninth screen, gathered on a grand portico overlooking a rolling lawn with views of the distant Catskills on the far side of the Hudson Valley. At one point, one of them sets off a miniature cannon, signaling a climax of sorts before the work's memorably offbeat conclusion.

Also on view at MOCA are excellent exhibitions of works by Baltimore artist Joyce Scott and Canadian artist Jessica Eaton.

Scott's lush and intricately beaded sculptures focus on racial bigotry, genocide, street violence and other wrenching topics in ways that blend beauty and shock.

In Eaton's "Wild Permutations," the artist uses colored filters in studio photographs of flowers or geometric forms in variations that explore possibilities of color and mood in repeated images of the same motif.

Lastly, in its main lobby, MOCA is displaying "The Way Things Go," ("Der Laufe Der Dinge" in the original German) a 30-minute, 1987 video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss that records a mechanized performance of Rube Goldberg contraptions that tilt and fall, spin, swirl, drip, foam and explode in sequence after having been triggered at the start.

As with "The Visitors," the video is mesmerizing. Once you start watching, it's hard to peel yourself away.

In sum, the current suite of exhibitions at MOCA is one of the best since the museum moved to its architecturally handsome new home in University Circle's Uptown in the fall of 2012.

By combining superb installations of photographs and sculptural objects along with highly compelling videos, MOCA has discovered a way to encourage visitors to linger for an extended visit - no small accomplishment for a relatively diminutive institution that one could otherwise trot through quickly in a few minutes.

MOCA's curators are learning how to program their new building like a fine-tuned instrument. The only question now is whether they can top what they've done over the past few months.

Stay tuned: A new cycle of exhibitions opens with a solo show by Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis and "How to Remain Human," a group show of works by 13 artists from across Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania.