The future-facing, CGI-heavy video is a collaboration with director Andrew Thomas Huang, Alessandro Michele and James Merry
Björk has released her spectacular new video for “The Gate”. Premiered in an installation by Nowness for London Fashion Week over the weekend, the futuristic, CGI-heavy video comes directed by her frequent collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang, with creative direction by Björk, Alessandro Michele (who designed the dress the musician wears in the video), and James Merry (who designed her headpiece).
Where Björk’s last album Vulnicura used a metaphor of a ‘chest wound’ to explore the grief she felt following her divorce from ex-husband Matthew Barney, the video for “The Gate” sees that wound heal. “The wound was going through that whole album, especially in the video for ‘Family’,” Björk explained in a live Q&A on Friday. “To come through that with Andy in the visual world – we’d almost gone into short speech describing that he’d be the one directing this video, where it (the wound) heals.”
Speaking to Nowness today, Huang described the utopian concept behind the video. “‘The Gate’ picks up where 2015’s Vulnicura left off,” he said. “It is the first glimpse into Björk’s utopia. The doorway lies within the wound from Vulnicura, which now appears transformed into a prismatic portal channeled between the chests of two lovers. Not lovers in the quotidian romantic sense, but in a broader cosmological way. As a throughway into Björk’s new album, ‘The Gate’ is a declaration of hope sung by a woman refracted and re-formed into a luminous whole.”
“I am especially proud of this film as I feel it is a culmination of my five-year collaboration with Björk and James Merry,” he added. “It’s been such a nourishing three-way relationship and this film is the perfect synthesis of our brains and our hearts. Having Alessandro Michele’s design as the centerpiece in this film is a dream.”
“The Gate” is available on a limited edition 12” vinyl from September 22 at the One Little Indian store. Watch the video via Nowness and read its lyrics below, and revisit Dazed’s cover story with Björk.
my healed chestwound
transformed into a gate
where i receive love from
where i give love from
and i
care for you
i care for you
split into many parts
splattered light beams into prisms
that will reunite
if you
care for me
and then ill care for you
didnt used to be so needy
just more broken than normal
proud self sufficiency
my silhouette is oval
it is a gate
i can
care for you from
i care for you
you care for me