{"id":2106973,"date":"2026-08-21T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2106973"},"modified":"2026-08-21T11:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T08:00:00","slug":"bjorks-hometown-museum-gives-her-exhibition-after-reviled-moma-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2106973","title":{"rendered":"Bj\u00f6rk’s Hometown Museum Gives Her Exhibition After Reviled MoMA Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Bjork.-Nerve-Bloom-2026-3.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\t\u201cWhen you listen to a song for the first time, it is like swallowing a whale.\u201d So reads the wall text in an exhibition by Bj\u00f6rk, a pop star whose relationship to music has long been unique, to say the least. She adds, in the same handwritten scrawl, \u201cI don\u2019t think of myself as a visual artist \u2026 Everything I do comes from a sonic point of view. This is something I have called \u2018sonic symbolism,\u2019 sound made visual, a reverse synesthesia.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAll of that prepares visitors to enter a room at the National Gallery of Iceland devoted to \u201cNerve Bloom,\u201d a new song that Bj\u00f6rk commissioned painter Natalia Kleszczewska and 3D graphics designer Natalie Liu to respond to for the show. Their collaboration greets viewers on a small screen on a pedestal, bearing a digital display of two animated figures slithering around each other and wrapping each other up. They appear plantlike, as if grown from a root system, but also humanoid, with fibrous muscles propelling them around virtual space. The hybridization intensifies farther into the gallery, where two floor-to-ceiling screens subsume the space and introduce the presence of horses that dissolve between realistic and fantastical forms, with heads slowly rising and falling, alternating between stare-downs and shows of deference. Meanwhile, over plangent piano and skittering minimalist percussion sounds, Bj\u00f6rk\u2019s voice coos, \u201cI bow, I bow \/ This is appreciation \/ Of all the sensations \/ You are brought to me \/ Neurons glowing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe mind-melting amalgam of the \u201cNerve Bloom\u201d installation is transfixing, psychedelic in a folkloric way that feels planted in a naturalistic past but projected into an otherworldly future, where painterly qualities coalesce with digital effects and music is nobly served by visuals and vice versa. It is also the most fully realized work in an exhibition whose ambitions are otherwise much more measured.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd understandably so: After a notoriously reviled 2015 survey at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art, it is easy to imagine why Bj\u00f6rk would want to keep expectations in check. (In The<\/em>New York Times<\/em>, Roberta Smith described elements of that MoMA show as \u201ctacky,\u201d \u201cdisappointing,\u201d and \u201cludicrously infantilizing,\u201d and fans of merciless criticism would be well served by looking into other reviews from the time.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

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View of Nerve Bloom<\/i>, 2026, featuring works made with Natalia Kleszczewska and Natalie Liu.<\/span>Courtesy National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjav\u00edk<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tWhile the blowback was mostly directed at the institution and not at Bj\u00f6rk herself, the artist strikes a less lofty and more modest tone in her hometown, with a smaller-scale show whose two other major presentations focus on songs and videos already out in the world, though less immersively so. Both are from her 2022 album Fossora<\/em>, and both relate to her mother, the environmental activist Hildur R\u00fana Hauksd\u00f3ttir, who died in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSorrowful Soil\u201d is the more moving of the two, played here in a new arrangement for which the members of a supporting choir were recorded on isolated microphones so their voices would sound more distinct. The presentation was inspired by Janet Cardiff\u2019s canonical sound art work The Forty Part Motet<\/em> (2001), and the aural effect is glorious, with surround-sound delivered by way of 30 high-fidelity speakers raised on stands to be appreciated at ear level. (In her wall text, Bj\u00f6rk writes, \u201cIt turns out that speakers are human \u2026 or sound-puppets.\u201d) On a large screen at one end of the ellipse is the video that accompanied the song upon release, with Bj\u00f6rk sitting on a rock in front of lava flowing from the Fagradalsfjall volcano while singing lines like \u201cIn a woman\u2019s lifetime \/ She gets 400 eggs \/ But only two or three nests\u201d and \u201cYou did well \/ You did your best.\u201d<\/p>\n

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View of Sorrowful Soil<\/i>, 2022, in \u201cecholalia.\u201d<\/span>Courtesy National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjav\u00edk<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cAncestress,\u201d written just two weeks after Hildur\u2019s passing, pays poetic tribute while scrambling the senses: \u201cYou see with your own eyes \/ But hear with your mother\u2019s.\u201d The video for it, projected at large scale in a gallery space lined with a red textile woven with the song\u2019s musical score, follows a ritualistic procession including Bj\u00f6rk through an Icelandic valley.<\/p>\n

\n\tNeither video is less than epic, but their availability on YouTube makes their inclusion in the museum less than revelatory. Still, Bj\u00f6rk\u2019s engagement with her mother in the place where she was raised adds contextual heft, as does the show\u2019s role as a centerpiece of the programming for this year\u2019s Reykjav\u00edk Arts Festival.<\/p>\n

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Courtesy National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjav\u00edk<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThe festival is an ambitious citywide initiative that also drifts into other regions of Iceland, and it includes another show at the National Gallery devoted to James Merry, who made many of the elaborate masks and jewelry works featured in Bj\u00f6rk\u2019s recent concert tours and videos (including those for \u201cSorrowful Soil\u201d and \u201cAncestress\u201d). Merry\u2019s show includes other projects\u2014like masks inspired by pagan fertility figures and sculptures informed by archaeological studies\u2014but focuses mostly on his relationship with Bj\u00f6rk, who hired him as an assistant in 2009, six years before he started making the work for which he has become known.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a shared catalog, the curator of the two exhibitions describes them as \u201cdiscrete yet intertwined\u201d and writes about creative entanglement between Bj\u00f6rk and Merry as well as others around Reykjav\u00edk. In a conversation with the two artists published in that book, Merry talks about a sort of symbiosis between them, noting that his masks were \u201cnever meant to completely obscure Bj\u00f6rk, more like to blur her edges and bring other archetypal aspects into focus.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s fitting, then, that his and her work harmonize at the museum\u2014and even more fitting that Bj\u00f6rk comes across less as an overextended polymath, as she did at MoMA, and more as a musical matriarch and decidedly collaborative creature.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/bjork-exhibtion-national-gallery-iceland-review-1234795094\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Bjork.-Nerve-Bloom-2026-3.jpg?w=1024″] \u201cWhen you listen to a song for the first time, it is like swallowing a whale.\u201d So reads the wall text in an exhibition by Bj\u00f6rk, a pop star whose relationship to music has long been unique, to say the least. She adds, in the same handwritten scrawl, \u201cI don\u2019t think of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2106973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2106973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2106973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2106973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2106973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2106973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}