At the Museum of Modern Art on Sunday afternoon, Björk was seemingly everywhere. An artist known as Shoplifter sewed strands of hair onto Björk’s face. Around the corner, a textile conservator restrung pearls onto a topless wedding gown by Alexander McQueen, which was also worn by Björk. Nearby, Björk’s crystal-encrusted face floated in midair. A miniature Björk was on her way.
This Björk army was made up of mannequins, 3-D-scanned from her body, capturing her fierce and delicate features. Posed on the third floor of MoMA, the mannequins were being primped for a preview of the museum’s retrospective of her work, opening to the public next Sunday. The show is an immersive sonic and visual landscape, covering more than 20 years of her career. With music, video, fashion and technology all playing a part, the show is among the museum’s largest and most technically involved installations. “She’s literally worked with all the departments” in the museum for the exhibit, said Klaus Biesenbach, MoMA’s curator at large who helped conceive of the show.
After three years in development, the show’s details were still coming together this week. In the museum’s atrium, a newly constructed two-story structure was flooded with designers, carpenters, curators and audio- and video-makers. The beak of the infamous swan dress Björk wore to the 2001 Oscars had been refluffed; the yak head from the 3-D video for “Wanderlust” was fumigated. For “Black Lake,” a MoMA-commissioned video installation for the emotional, 10-minute song off Björk’s latest record, “Vulnicura,” 6,000 soundproofing cones were meticulously hand-stitched in felt, and technicians spent hours mixing the song for the space, with Björk’s oversight.
Wrapped up in finishing the show, Björk had been elusive. On Friday, she tromped through in an electric-blue dress and some hybrid hiking boot/high tops that only she could pull off. The exhibition is at once highly personal — her handwriting announces the display, and her diaries, starting from age 9, will be on view — and evocative of her collaborative style. Björk’s vision pulses through, and so does those of her friends’.
The fashion designer Hussein Chalayan lent the Tyvek dress she wore on the cover of her 1995 album “Post.” Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, recorded vocal prompts for the audio guide, which is also narrated by Margret Vilhjalmsdottir, an Icelandic actress whom Björk has known since they worked in a Reykjavik secondhand shop as teenagers. Sjon, an Iceland poet, wrote her fictionalized biography.
Mr. Biesenbach, who like Björk is 49, called her the paradigm of a ’90s artist, a compliment. “The ’90s, my generation, said it’s all about relational aesthetics, it’s all about collaboration,” he said. Many tried to cross over to art, film and design; “she lives that.” A centerpiece of the exhibition is “Songlines,” a labyrinthlike audio tour through Björk’s music and psyche. Visitors wear headphones connected to Bluetooth beacons, which locate them through the space, cuing the proper songs and visuals. The technology was adapted by Volkswagen, a sponsor of the show, from a hands-free program it made to soundtrack driving. (The geolocation obviates the problem of continually looking down at a device, rather than up at the exhibition.) For “Black Lake,” the architect David Benjamin and his team, working with the firm Autodesk, turned the song into a literal blueprint, mapping the music’s volume and frequency. Then using that for a 3-D topography to place the cones.
“Every inch of the room corresponds to one second of the song,” Mr. Benjamin said. Beyond the technical innovation, he added, Björk wanted it to be textural, internal and organic, asking, “Could you design me a room that feels like you’re in somebody’s intestine?”
Michel Gondry, the director known for his visual wit, who has made videos with Björk since her solo debut, said that as a collaborator, “she brings half of the ideas, plus, as a bonus, confidence and trust.” He contributed a new wallsize video to the exhibition. “I have to admit that she opened my eyes on contemporary art,” Mr. Gondry wrote in an email. “Before I knew her, I was maybe a bit conservative in this area.”
Björk’s lifelong interest in visual art is clear from her diaries, which are collaged with images from Willem de Kooning and Georg Baselitz. Writing in Icelandic as a schoolgirl and English as an adult, she jotted musical notations, lyrics and stage directions. “Countdown: now, now is fun!” one note reads. The lyrics for “Declare Independence” are written on the back of a business card.
Mr. Biesenbach has been courting Björk for an exhibition since he met her in 2000; it took her 12 years to agree. Sjon who has known Björk since they were surrealism-obsessed teenagers — performing and “just being a cultural nuisance in Rejkyavik, let’s say” — said he understood why Björk waited.
“She’s at that point in her career where many artists realize that they have reached a certain maturity and maybe now it’s time to take a step back and reflect,” he said. That the exhibit comes in the aftermath of the end of Björk’s relationship with the artist Matthew Barney, the subject of “Vulnicura,” “maybe made it more urgent,” Sjon said. (Mr. Barney has pieces in the show, including a music box and the shoes on the wedding dress-Björk.)
In the video for “Black Lake,” filmed in a cave in Iceland, Björk wears a dress ridged with mudlike ripples; the aesthetics echo the installation design. The song is pure heartbreak. “Devotion to family was always our sacred mutual mission, which you abandoned,” she sings, adding, “Did I love you too much?” In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Björk said she found the track hard to bear.
But the video offers some respite. As snow piled up outside the museum on Sunday, Björk appeared in the room wearing a ruffled short-sleeve dress. On two screens, she watched herself spin in a green field, gossamer wings floating off her body. There were 43 speakers, and six subwoofers big enough that the sound technicians joked they would vibrate paintings through the museum.
“It sounds great,” Björk said, smiling, when the last note reverberated. “Can we put it louder?”
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