Go Inside Bjork’s Sumptuous, Career-Spanning MOMA Retrospective
Björk‘s Museum of Modern Art exhibition is set to open on March 8th, but before the curtain rolls back on this can’t-miss multimedia event, Rolling Stone has your first look at the singer’s career-spanning MOMA retrospective. The exhibit will feature “sounds, videos, objects, instruments, costumes, and images” from her 1993 Debut up through her heartbreaking 2015 release Vulnicura. Rolling Stone spoke to the MOMA’s Chief Curator at Large Klaus Biesenbach about the upcoming exhibit.
“I asked Björk for the first time in 2000 if she would be thinking, considering about doing an exhibition in the contemporary art world, and her question was ‘How do you put music into a frame and how do you put it on a pedestal,'” Biesenbach tells Rolling Stone. “We started talking and her condition, her challenge to me, was saying ‘Try to make an exhibition, a visual museum, that’s obviously primarily about music.'”
In addition to “filming a new commission and developing some architectures,” the Björk exhibit will also features outfits, artwork, music videos and lyric sheets compiled from throughout the singer’s career, from her handwritten manuscript for Biophilia‘s “Crystalline” to the legendary swan dress Björk wore to the 73rd annual Academy Awards in 2001. The exhibit will reside at the MOMA from March 8th through June 17th. Along the way, Björk has scheduled six intimate New York gigs, kicking off March 7th with a performance at Carnegie Hall.
“What really structured the collaboration was I said, ‘We will do this retrospective in 2015 but it will be a retrospective looking back at where you will have arrived in 2015,'” Biesenbach said. “I hope that a visitor will take away that music is as personal as it is art.”