Though Björk’s music has always been beyond reproach, her relationship with the art world has been more complicated. Yes, we all loved that she popped up at the opening of the Venice Biennale this year for a DJ set during which she was dressed like a Labubu, but her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015 was probably the institution’s worst reviewed show of all time. Jason Farago called it a “fiasco,” Jerry Saltz called it “a discombobulated mess,” and Roberta Smith called it “ludicrously infantilizing and tedious.” And all that hate was in turn collected by the ordinarily groovy New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, who said the museum came “off ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie.”
But Venice proved that we will never tire of seeing Björk crop up in an art context. “Echolalia” and “Metamorphlings” are two concurrent exhibitions that opened earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Iceland for the Reykjavík Arts Festival, and take over all four of the museum’s galleries with the collaborative universe of Björk and James Merry, her longtime co-creative director. Merry’s show marks the first museum retrospective of his career, with over 80 masks and ritual objects spanning embroidery, metalwork, jewelry and 3D printing, made for Björk but also for Tilda Swinton and Iris van Herpen. Björk’s half comprises three immersive installations based around music: a preview of her forthcoming album and two elegies from the era of the album Fossora (2022), Ancestress and Sorrowful Soil. These honor her late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, and are in Reykjavík restaged at theatrical scale. An attached one-day rave, also called Echolalia, will coincide with the August 12 solar eclipse in Hafnarfjörður and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the label Björk co-founded, Smekkleysa (“Bad Taste”).
“Björk: Echolalia“
Artist: Björk
Venue: National Gallery of Iceland
Address: Fríkirkjuvegur 7, 101 Reykjavík
Through: September 19, 2026
In the catalogue, Merry says he finds it amusing that he’s sometimes identified as “Björk’s mask-maker,” because “it was always just like this little side quest that I would do at night.” Moth (2015) emerged from an all-nighter while the two were living together preparing for that ill-fated MoMA show and the first live performance of Vulnicura (2015), her album documenting her breakup from Matthew Barney. Björk had left moth specimens in the kitchen and Merry used these to render a dramatic curved form. Like much of Barney’s work, it demonstrates the influence of sci-fi and S&M, but there’s no mistaking the piece as emerging from her universe. Look close and you see the symmetry of the pearl emergences, the order in the chaos.
Björk always lets you find her bass notes. A divorce is good, but what about the bigger ending? Her resin Seðja Spoon (2021) emerged from a period when her mother, grandmother and grandfather passed away. Björk sat at her grandfather’s deathbed and on his last day was handed “this ugly plastic spoon-thing” to give him glycerin to ease his breathing. She asked Merry to design a more beautiful death spoon. He took inspiration from the Icelandic tungljurt plant (aka “moonwort”), as well as the mouths of baby birds. It appears in the film for Ancestress, a strange little shiny purple orchid boasting a little bowl that can carry sap. In the museum, Ancestress is staged as a ritualistic procession in a remote Icelandic valley. Björk’s son Sindri Eldon sings in the chorus and one can see how the spoon represents all these themes in a single object. Life is not zero sum but passed from one entity to another.
The collaborations between Merry and Björk can be seen in this light as well: the energy of one person being translated into new forms. The song Sorrowful Soil becomes in these exhibitions a nine-part polyphonic choral requiem presented as a spatial sound installation with 30 speakers, each transmitting a single voice from the Hamrahlíð Choir under Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir—the conductor who directed Björk in the same choir when she was but a 16-year-old member of the Icelandic post-punk band Tappi Tíkarrass (“Cork The Bitch’s Arse”). Björk is not someone who lacks creativity but thrives on direction and collaboration. “She gets four-hundred eggs,” she sings in Sorrowful Soil, “But only two or three nests.” This exhibition surveys a few of those nests.
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