Inside Björk’s Surreal Museum Takeover at the National Gallery of Iceland

The last time a museum tried to capture the fantastical world of Icelandic artist Björk, it fell flat. Art critic Roberta Smith called MoMa’s 2015 retrospective “scant, cramped,” and “reek[ing] of ambivalence” all while “jammed into a tacky little two-story pavilion.” Frieze’s critic wrote that the show was impressive in just how “vapid [it made] a genuinely interesting artist.” The prevailing sentiment was that art institutions may lack the formal language to meaningfully explore and engage with pop music.

Now, over a decade later, Björk has released two new challenging, deeply intimate albums; toured the ambitious concert series Cornucopia; invited fans into an immersive VR album exhibition at Somerset House, London; and collaborated with Rosalía on Lux’s operatic ode to all-consuming love, “Berghain.” Her oeuvre has only gotten richer and more high-concept with time, expanding the boundaries of pop as she experiments with technology and sound. This week, a major museum has, at last, found the courage to take on the artist’s magical, delicately layered imaginings once again.

From May 31 to September 20, the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavik presents “Echolalia” and “Metamorphlings,” two interwoven shows exploring Björk’s work and that of her friend, longtime collaborator, and co-creative director James Merry. The exhibitions take over the entire museum and feature a new, monumental piece speaking to Björk’s next creative chapter; immersive, theatrical representations of the songs Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil; and over 80 incredible masks by Merry, many of which he made with and for Björk.

“Both Björk and James are interested in nature and are profoundly inspired by the natural world, in particular Iceland,” says chief curator Pari Stave. “But they’re also interested in technology. They’re interested in new forms of making things, whether it’s recording sound or creating images or sculpting masks. They’re interested in material and method. These works are resonant with meaning.”

Björk and Merry began working together in 2009 when Björk brought him into her team to help with research for Biophilia. “She will have quite specific references, color palettes, textures, etc. for each song,” Merry says. “So I will usually try and tap into those and mix them with the forms I am experimenting with at the time, until it grows into a new physical headpiece.” He’s created masks like the curving red latex piece looking almost like a stingray that Björk wears on her Vulnicura album cover and the metallic, organic gems models wore for friend Iris van Herpen’s “Earthrise” couture collection. The latter were inspired by “three of my visual obsessions at the time: the structure of baleen (whale teeth), the delicate forms of the Icelandic tungljurt plant, and the anatomical lines of the zygoma or cheekbone,” Merry adds.

Both Merry and Björk draw deeply from nature, and this love comes out in the show. For instance, the installation for “Sorrowful Soil”—a song off Björk’s 2022 album Fossora that eulogizes her mother—brings the visitor into a room showing the singer performing on blackened lava fields as the Icelandic volcano Fagradalsfjall erupts around her. Thirty speakers surround the visitor, each transmitting a single voice from the Hamrahlíð choir. “When you’re in the center of the space, you hear the full score, and as you walk around the room, you can hear the individual voices,” Stave says.

Björk’s new piece is called “Nerve Bloom.” “I did it with Natalia Kleszczewska and Natalie Liu,” Björk writes. “My role in it was a creative director, bringing in the singer-songwriter tradition, where emotionally precise things happen inside the structure of a song. I guided color palettes, textures, and the environments the music happens in.... Everything I do comes from a sonic point of view.”

Merry also made new works for the shows. “I’ve always fixated on the mercurial, changing aspects of nature... like mutation, transformation, and the ‘in-between’ stages of metamorphosis,” he says. “Recently, that has led me back to archaeology, specifically the Iron Age in Europe and a period called ‘La Tene,’ where the hybrid forms and concentration on the face (rather than the body) really resonates with me. I already have a few new masks in the pipeline for this group.”

The museum hopes the shows will highlight a new side of Iceland to visitors—and give locals something worth returning to. A highlight will be on August 12, when Björk will host Echolalia, a one-day solar eclipse rave that will culminate as the moon covers the sun to bring Iceland into total darkness. Björk will DJ, and she has invited Arca, Ronja, and others to perform. “On the face of it—if you didn’t know more about the origins of these works—you might think this is about costume and theatricality,” says Stave. “In fact, in both cases, the works are so much deeper.”