12/06/2026
Sýningarnar eru opnar í Listasafn Íslands / National Gallery of Iceland til 21. september 🤩
"Björk is exhibiting three works. Two immersive installations of the songs “Ancestress” and “Sorrowful Soil” from her last album Fossora, and the work “Nerve Bloom,” to be released on her upcoming album. Each work lives in its own room, with a handwritten note by Björk herself at the entrance explaining some of the context."
Eva Yuki Mik weaves past what seems like half of Reykjavík, including the President of Iceland, to experience echolalia, Björk's new exhibition showing at The National Gallery of Iceland until 20 September 2026.
"Long, deep red curtains with the score printed on them mark the entrance to “Ancestress.” It is like stepping into a cinema, playing an old Akira Kurosawa film. On the big screen, we see the music video Björk produced together with director Andrew Thomas Huang. The film is like a ritualistic wake, in which Björk is leading the way through the moss valley with her musicians and dancers following her in this funeral march. Together, they walk as one creature, an organism of grief carved into the empty landscape. Björk wrote this song in the last days before her mother’s passing. The valley is where her mother used to pick herbs and where now her ashes lay. In the handwritten note, Björk explains how, due to the movement of tectonic plates, an underground river formed and the whole valley collapsed one level deeper into the earth’s stratum. As a result, the valley is marked by empty riverbeds and cavities. Björk writes, ‘’a river-that-isn’t-, a waterfall-that-isn’t.’’ The loss of a river is carved into the landscape, a story told in its negative space."
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