IN “The Visitors,” a nine-screen video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson that will have its first American showing next month, the artist lies in a pedestal bathtub almost in a trance, strumming a guitar as he repeatedly sings a refrain, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” Over the course of an hour his voice falls and rises, on its own and in unison with performers on the other eight screens — each seen as if in a painting, playing an instrument in a different room of a beautiful, run-down mansion and singing the same enigmatic refrain at a dirgelike pace.

Last August the nine performers gathered in a room of the mansion, two hours north of New York City in the Hudson Valley, to rehearse. “The Visitors” would be shot later that week in a single take, with nine cameras distributed around the house, but that day they simulated being in separate rooms by avoiding eye contact.

To one onlooker what was most striking was the extraordinary emotional range and intensity of their performances. Limited to just a few simple lyrics, which they repeated dozens of times, the singers created an entirely absorbing ensemble piece that was alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swelled in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir.

It was not the first such work for Mr. Kjartansson (his name is pronounced RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun), an Icelandic artist who, at 36, has spent more than a decade exploring the potential of repetitive performance to yield unexpected meanings, and who has lately become one of the most celebrated performance artists anywhere. In 2009 he was the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, and two years later his piece “Bliss” won the Malcolm Award for the most innovative work at Performa, the three-week performance art biennial in New York. His traveling museum survey, “Song,” is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston through April 7, and his second solo show at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, featuring “The Visitors,” will open Feb. 1.