Björk Is Unleashing a Spellbinding Multimedia Exhibition in Iceland

Björk, the Icelandic pop icon and multidisciplinary artist, is opening an exhibition of immersive works at the National Gallery of Iceland, timed to coincide with the 2026 Reykjavik Arts Festival.

Over the past five decades, Björk has emerged as a singular creative figure bridging the worlds of pop, spectacle, and the avant-garde alongside a carousel of collaborators. “Echolalia,” the show’s title, speaks to this. It refers the repetition of sounds or words heard from another person, typically by children as they acquire language, but here takes on a more capacious meaning.

“Echolalia” is accompanied by a first museum show for James Merry, the embroiderer behind many of Björk’s beguiling masks. Together, the shows will take over all four galleries of the National Gallery of Iceland.

The first gallery contains an installation that draws from Björk’s forthcoming album (still untitled), one the Reykjavík Arts Festival said offers “an introduction to the latest chapter of the artist’s ongoing explorations of transformation and collaboration.” Two further installations, which were first released alongside her 2022 album , are given their own galleries.

The first, , looks at the cyclical nature of life. It’s set in a rugged, cloud-swept Icelandic valley and presents a lamentation staged by a procession of crimson-clad musicians and dancers, including Björk and her son Sindri Eldon. At the command of a gong, the procession descends into the valley to dance and cavort. was shot by Andrew Thomas Huang, a frequent Björk collaborator who has been behind the camera on many of her music videos over the past decade. The masks and ritual objects were created by Merry.

The second, , is a nine-part choral work in honor of Björk’s mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018. The video is oval-shaped and looms and drifts over the molten flows of the erupting Fagradalsfjall volcano. Each of the 30 speakers in the gallery connects to a single voice from the Hamrahlíð choir, which organizers said creates the experience of moving between “singular and synergistic voices, invoking a sense of humanity that is at once individual and collective.”

Merry’s first retrospective, meanwhile, is titled “Metamorphlings” and will present more than 80 works created by the self-trained artist over the past decade. Merry was a graduate student at Oxford in Ancient Greek in the late 2000s when he connected with Björk over email, beginning a collaboration that continues to inform the singer’s aesthetic. The mask has been Merry’s central craft and the National Gallery of Iceland will present many worn by Björk on camera and on stage, as well as those commissioned by the likes of Tilda Swinton and Iris van Herpen. The mask, organizers said, operates “as a conduit for transformation, a catalyst for performance, and a portal through which identity can mutate.”

Björk’s most recent foray into the museum world came last year when she created an immersive sound installation for the Centre Pompidou in Paris that used A.I. software to produce the calls of endangered and extinct animals.