Remembering Avicii by Stepping Into His Bewildering World

STOCKHOLM — Visitors filed one by one into a dark, 6 foot by 12 foot room at the Space exhibition center here last Friday, where they were greeted by a mix of ringing and muddled noises: camera clicks, audience cheers, plane engine roars. Strobe lights bounced off a ceiling-high screen showing the interiors of cars, paparazzi flashes and the reaching arms of a festival crowd in quick succession. Jagged mirrors in the ceiling reflected the chaos below.

The effect was meant to reproduce the bewildering experience of being the wildly successful, globe-trotting D.J. Avicii. For some visitors, it made a big impact. “I think I would go crazy if I had to live like that,” said Magdalena Grundström, a 51-year-old classical musician.

Had entrants turned right, they would have encountered a very different space. Through a beaded curtain, pan pipe music was playing in the neighboring room. On one of its sea-green walls, a text on hanging fabric explained how Buddhism can help with anxiety.

These contrasting rooms are part of the Avicii Experience, a new immersive exhibition dedicated to the life of the Swedish electronic dance music producer that opened in Stockholm in late February. The temporary museum is designed to give visitors an insight into both the musical talents that brought him global fame as an in-demand D.J., and the pressures that led up to his suicide.

It also grapples with how to memorialize a short life shaped by extraordinary public interest in a way that feels both entertaining and thoughtful.

Avicii, born Tim Bergling, died while on vacation in Muscat, Oman, in April 2018. Two years earlier, he had retired from touring, citing the overwhelming schedule of an internationally famous D.J. He also struggled with alcohol and prescription painkillers.

Avicii was only 22 years old when “Levels,” a hooky dance track featuring an Etta James sample, propelled him to stardom. Over the subsequent six years, his music took electronic dance music, or E.D.M., in new directions, blending beats with folk vocals on tracks like “Wake Me Up” from his 2013 debut, “True.” He was nominated for two Grammys, and his songs have been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify.

After Avicii’s death, his family visited Abba the Museum, an interactive, immersive space dedicated to the Swedish pop group, also in Stockholm. They thought something similar could work as a tribute to Avicii, Lisa Halling-Aadland, the content producer of the Avicii Experience, said in a video interview.

“It’s obviously two very different emotions tied to each of these,” Halling-Aadland said, “but we said yes, we can do something. Not the same, but something.”

Halling-Aadland and her mother, Ingmarie Halling, the exhibition’s creative director, sought approval from the Bergling family throughout the planning process. “We just had to consistently turn to them. We had an idea that’s good for us, and then we said, does this seem right to you guys?” Halling-Aadland said.

The Avicii Experience, which will run for several years, is designed to emphasize the contrast between Tim Bergling, an introverted person whose passion was composing music, and Avicii, a global E.D.M. brand.

“The normal impression was perhaps, a very successful, rich guy: Why did he end his life the way he did?” Klas Bergling, the musician’s father, said in a phone interview. “I don’t mean that we have an answer. Not at all. But you get another perspective.”

The exhibition includes a replica of Avicii’s childhood bedroom, complete with a discarded pizza box and a computer screen showing his World of Warcraft character. Nearby visitors can don a virtual reality headset, enter a replica of his recording studio and sing the vocals on one of his tracks.

The last 10 years have seen a boom in immersive experiences. Globally there are currently at least five immersive Van Gogh exhibitions — Instagram-friendly shows that have attracted visitors beyond the usual audience for art galleries. In London, there have recently been immersive shows dedicated to the work of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, and the theater company Punchdrunk has been exploring immersive, interactive productions for the last decade.

It’s not surprising that as immersive experiences become more widespread, the subjects they try to tackle will broaden too, said Sarah Elger, the C.E.O. of an immersive experiences company called Pseudonym Productions.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get it right. “Designing an immersive experience in and of itself is an art form,” she said in a recent video interview. For immersive memorial spaces, Elger stressed the importance of a curator having a “personal connection” with the subject. “Challenges will arise if this becomes a mainstay of how we want to memorialize people,” she added.

In 2020, plans for an interactive, immersive Holocaust memorial experience in Kyiv, Ukraine, ignited a firestorm of criticism, including a rebuke from a curator who said it would be “Holocaust Disney.”

The Avicii Experience is billed as a “tribute” to the musician, and includes spaces that feel funereal. The final room in the show is small and churchlike, with white stone-effect walls and flickering electric candles in alcoves. A slide show of Avicii photographs is projected on one wall, while a solemn orchestral version of his hit “The Nights” plays. In a section called “Unanswered Questions,” a text explains that nobody close to Avicii saw his suicide coming: “How could a human being be in the middle of such a creative flow and suddenly be gone?”

Priya Khanchandani, the curator of an exhibition about Amy Winehouse at London’s Design Museum that includes immersive experiences, said that the line between emotional engagement and entertainment is a tricky one.

“It’s about sensitivity, and the immersive elements have to be part of the storytelling rather than being a kind of gimmicky vehicle for sensory experience in themselves,” she said. “The danger, of course, with these kinds of experiences is they become too consumer focused. The museum becomes a theme park, or akin to a sort of retail experience.”

Outside the Avicii Experience, a shop sold Avicii branded caps for 449 Swedish kronor, around $45. Part of the profits from the Experience go to the Tim Bergling Foundation, a mental health charity set up by Bergling’s family.

For Avicii fans, visiting the exhibition means moving between the roles of consumer and mourner. Ayesha Simmons, 20, traveled from London to see the show. “That room with the jagged mirrors felt so important to me, because it gave us even the tiniest idea of what it must have felt like for him,” she said in a Facebook message.

The immersive elements did not impact everyone, though. “I just thought I was in an amusement park,” Daniel Täng, 20, said after walking around the exhibition. “I didn’t really think about it.”