Back in March, Icelandic visionary Björk opened up her oeuvre in a major mid-career retrospective at the MoMA gallery in New York. The exhibition reflected on two decades of her work, from the early days with her – appropriately titled – 1993 album Debut, to the recent premiere of music filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang’s Black Lake. To coincide with the show, Thames & Hudson released a tome detailing Björk’s boundary pushing body of work. Seven distinct booklets came together to create Bjork: Archives, with one publishing the intimate correspondence between philosopher Timothy Morton and the artist herself. The email exchange was a three month collaboration between the pair as they tried to discover what ‘ism’ Björk – as an Icelandic pop singer – is. As we publish these private emails in-part, Björk explains in her own words how important such a connection was to her.
“ last year i reached out to the philosopher timothy morton to see if he would be interested to start a dialogue with me, to search for a definition of me and my friends’ stance in this world, which i felt his writing came very close to already. of course i’m still searching but this email chat of ours got pretty close and we shared a couple of coordinates trying to define what “ism” a pop musician from iceland would be ..... “
Björk: The Archives, published by Thames & Hudson is available now from here
