Björk at the MoMa: Feel the beating of my heart – tagesspiegel

16:26 clock From Tomasz Kurianowicz

Travel in a sonorous parallel world: The retrospective of Björk at New York’s Museum of Modern Art

And then they finally here. Björk. In the MoMA in New York, where her retrospective opens this Sunday. In the preliminary presentation, the lanky singer stands in front of a crowd of journalists and wearing a cactus-like costume that covers both body and face. Striking are mainly two sharp protruding into the sky stem that adorn the head of the Icelander. Is this serious? Probably not. The camouflage is an ironic counterpoint to the many Björk portraits, the exhibited Björk dolls, the 3-D reproductions and various relics of the exhibition

But the singer is just -. Shy, tender, cool and at the same time an unpredictable phenomenon.

Several years had MoMA PS1 curator and chief Klaus Biesenbach vain worked on winning singer for cooperation. It was only the production of their published in January ninth album “Vulnicura” the art of persuasion has borne fruit. The 49-year-old told, the exhibition curator and founder of the Berlin art works that they have now reached a maturity that justifies a retrospective. And besides, there was still the separation from her longtime partner Matthew Barney, she tells the story of the “Vulnicura” in unusually personal way.

Two events, then, to reflect on the events of the past 25 years. The MoMa mother ship in Manhattan was extensively for the first retrospective of a musician rebuilt. A kind of Björk game box next to the lobby: two cinema rooms and the special exhibition area to accommodate a Duplex built in the atrium of the museum. A museum in the Museum, which sucks the visitors in Björk’s world of ideas. You feel like you swallowed

And that is how it is meant. Björk Guðmundsdóttir has directed and created a parallel world in which the moods of the past eight albums and their time of origin can be simulated. So you can understand how Björk transformed from a young indie artist for a mature, the boundaries of the genre Pop-busting work of art. Your very visual, artificial approach makes them – like power plant, which occurred at the MoMa and exhibited their video installations in Munich – so sexy for the museum context

Eight stations are characterized Björk’s career after

. The many exhibits from her stage life are not that spectacular: the chunky, red boots by Walter von Beirendonck, the famous white swan dress by Marjan Pejoski that Björk wore at the Oscars 2001, and the robot from the video “All Is Full Of Love “by 1999. Stimulating is especially the symbiosis of the various elements. the light, the arrangement of the installations, the sounds and the self-produced seats, vibrate to the beat of the music, and of course the music itself Before the spaces entering, you get an audio guide that takes the suitable songs. In addition, you can hear a narrative voice that unfolds through poetically charged sentences a calming effect.

At the same time, every aspect of this exhibition is provided with a personal touch. The stories of the audio tracks were written by Björk’s best friend Margret Vilhjálmsdóttir with which the singer has jobbed as a teenager in a second-hand store. The halbfiktive biography wrote the Icelandic poet Sin. Other installations and elements have contributed former producers of music videos such as Michel Gondry

split the show at eight stations. It begins chronologically with the first album titled “Debut” of 1993 and ends at the current “Vulnicura” , In each space objects from the respective production years are issued: about specially built for Björk electric stringed instrument – the so-called Gravity Harp by Andrew Cavatorta but also evidence from Björk’s childhood like diary entries, photos and recordings from the adolescence and sketches for English songs. This is well worth seeing and evades the pure cult madness. Björk by time-eaten notepad and semi spidery, semi-controlled authored manuscripts suit the sensitive content of the lyrics

The symbiosis of music, narration and object show succeeds the exhibition, the visitor to draw deep into the cosmos Björk – in that mixture of detachment from the world and cosmic embrace. As soon as one enters the room, rewind the audio guide from the next chapter – it worked just as well with those taken from London David Bowie exhibition, which was shown last year at the Martin Gropius Bau

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