In immersive exhibitions in Iceland, Björk works across painting, video and music

In her homeland, a Björk summer is in bloom.

The National Gallery of Iceland is hosting two exhibitions celebrating the multi-faceted craft of the singer, musician, artist, conceptualist and fashion-forward being from another dimension.

‘Metamorphlings’ is a collection of masks created by James Merry, a Björk visual collaborator since 2009, many of them crafted for her tours and other projects. Echolalia presents three large-scale audiovisual installations. Two of those pieces, ‘Ancestress’ (a ‘lamentation… staged as a ritualistic procession of musicians andq dancers’) and nine-part choral work ‘Sorrowful Soil’, are elegies for her late mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. They were originally conceptualised around Björk’s 2022 album Fossora but are here ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale within a museum context for the first time’. Alongside those is a new piece, ‘Nerve Bloom’, offering a glimpse into the 60-year-old’s upcoming 11th album, her first studio collection since Fossora.

‘Through Björk, we celebrate brave and forward-thinking art that has, over the years, influenced the global cultural scene,’ says Lára Sóley, artistic director & CEO of Reykjavík Arts Festival, with the two exhibitions at the National Gallery ‘fill[ing] the spaces with an integration of music, craft, performance, technology and visual art’.

Describing ‘Nerve Bloom’, Björk says: ‘I don’t think of me as a visual artist. Because my heart is music. Everything I do comes from a sonic point of view. This is something I have called ‘sonic symbolism’, sound made visual, a reverse synaesthesia. When you listen to a song for the first time, it is like swallowing a whale, you need to feel the whole musical sculpture in one go. The structure of a song has always been extremely important to me. What shape it is. This is part of the craft of being a singer-songwriter... We are tune sculptors.’

Then, on 12 August 2026, there’s Echolalia: the rave. Björk hosts and DJs at the one-day event, coinciding with a solar eclipse, at Víðistaðatún in Hafnarfjörður. With the bill also including performances from Arca, Sideproject and Ronja, the rave marks the 40th anniversary of Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), the Icelandic collective and label that helped launch Björk’s omnivorous creativity.

Here, National Gallery of Iceland chief curator Pari Stave and Merry – an Englishman resident full-time in Iceland for 11 years – explain Björk’s big-time artistic sensuality.

Wallpaper*: Góðan daginn, Pari. What does ‘echolalia’ mean?

Pari Stave: The word refers to the repeating of words or phrases. It was a name given as a kind of umbrella title for the many different installations of Björk’s works.

W*: What was the idea behind Echolalia?

PS: Initially, Björk offered to show two video works, ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, that feature masks made by James. [Then] in time, she wanted to debut a new work, ‘Nerve Bloom’. As plans evolved further, she added videos of her live performances at Harpa from 2022 – collectively called Björk Orkestral – as well as single-channel videos made for certain songs – collectively called Avatars and Animations.

Taken together, the various installations and video works show the range of Björk’s creative collaboration with artists, some of whom she has worked with [during the course of] many years. It is important to note that she considers herself a singer-songwriter, but her reach extends into other media – often within the spirit of exploration and experimentation – by working with other artists.

W*: With ‘Ancestress’ and ‘Sorrowful Soil’, how are they ‘reimagined on a theatrical scale’?

PS: In the museum’s galleries, the scale of the video projections is cinematic, in the case of ‘Ancestress’, and the sound is optimised to the highest listening standards, so that in both installations the viewer has an immersive visual and aural experience of each work.

In ‘Sorrowful Soil’, each voice in a chorus of 30 choir members was individually recorded – in addition to Björk’s voice – and there is a speaker for each recording. So, as the viewers walk through the installation, they can hear each voice through a single, designated speaker, or hear the choir collectively, by standing in the centre of the room.

W*: What can you tell us about the piece based on ‘Nerve Bloom’, a new song from her next album?

PS: It’s an animation that combines analogue – traditional painting techniques – and technology: digital animation. Over a period of about seven months, Björk worked with the painter Natalia Kleszewska and the graphic artist Natalie Liu to create visual concept for the song. Paintings by Nathalia were animated by Natalie, using CGI technology.

The video components in the gallery include a layering of video, [such as] a large LED screen, a large-scale projection, and smaller projections showing details of the video on two-sided LED screens. The viewer is meant to view the installation from various angles but also align themselves with the centre of the video to observe the layering of images as they unfold.

W*:Takk fyrir for talking to me, James. What does your exhibition title ‘Metamorphlings’ signify?

James Merry: It’s combination of metamorphosis and -ling, a suffix often used for small creatures or beings. I've always tended to think of my masks as a family rather than isolated objects, connected through a kind of Linnaean evolutionary logic. Certain forms and motifs evolve from one mask to another, branching and mutating over time. So ‘Metamorphlings’ felt like an appropriate name, implying a small collection of shape-shifting creatures.

W*: You first met Björk in 2009 and began working with her as a research/personal assistant. What were some of your roles then?

JM: She had just finished the Volta tour when we first met and was in the early stages of developing what would later become Biophilia. So my role initially was as a research assistant, helping to gather and organise all the material she was absorbing that would eventually feed into that project.

W*: You started making masks for the Vulnicura tour. What were your brief/concept and materials for those masks?

JM: Björk’s visual direction centred on a sense of emotional emergency and the craft of embroidery as a form of repair, as well as a symbolic colour palette of healing lilac and urgent neon yellow. So I was really tapping into that and trying to create something that could function as a sort of protective veil – but at the same time feel romantic, organic and refined.

Many of those pieces were made while we were on tour. I would turn my hotel room into a studio and frantically try to create something new in the few days between each performance.

Putting together this retrospective made me fall in love with those pieces again. While I was restoring them, I could feel how they were made with such a burst of creative energy, so they got me feeling very nostalgic.

W*: Tell us, please, about the new mask you’ve created for ‘Metamorphlings’.

JM: The retrospective features over 80 of my masks, and I really wanted to include one new piece to debut at the opening. So I made a new work called Atenovx, as part of an ongoing series I am currently working on, inspired by Romano-Celtic archaeology of the later Iron Age. I had always been really fascinated by historical objects where timekeeping is embedded in the design – ways to track the cycles of the sun and the moon hammered into gold, and so on.

So I made this new piece to function both as a mask and as a working solar calendar, translating the cycle of the year onto the human face. Each month is marked with a gemstone, corresponding to the 12 months of our Julian calendar. The spring and autumn equinoxes align at the eyes, the winter solstice lies at the forehead and the summer solstice is represented by a pearl that rests in the mouth. A sequence of drilled holes marks each day of the year, through which a single pearl can be moved clockwise to track the passage of time.

W*: What is the magic of the mask?

JM: The ability to hide and reveal, both at the same time.

The National Gallery of Iceland, Fríkirkjuvegur 7, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland, until 20September. Tickets here. Rave information here