Autumn exhibitions in Copenhagen and the capital area

The art scene in Copenhagen hosts internationally acknowledged art museums and galleries. This Autumn, the museums present exhibitions created by Danish and international artists interpreting current global and cultural conditions through contemporary art. The exhibitions engage in affairs such as artificial intelligence and algorithms, gender and identity, climate change, cultural heritage, and architecture and geology. These perspectives are presented by individual exhibitions and unique collaborations, as the major art institutions, Glyptoteket and Copenhagen Contemporary, combine their expertise in sculptural archival and sound-installation displays. The autumn season plays a unique part in the exhibitions beyond Copenhagen, as visitors may engage in art institutions located in colorful, scenic surroundings by the sea and woodlands.

In the list below, you may find the current and upcoming exhibitions taking place this fall.

In the exhibition Against All Odds, Ix Shells brings 24 forgotten female artists back into the spotlight while exploring the possibilities of artificial intelligence and how it may be used to understand and communicate history.

The exhibition combines artwork and digital installations based on artificial intelligence. These installations use the 24 artists’ artworks, biographies, and research to tell their collective story of achieving success in 1870-1910 and disappearing from history. In the installations, Ix Shells transforms the data about the 24 women into abstract forms that both surround you and react to your movements. Ix Shells is one of today’s leading digital artists. With this exhibition, she merges the historical and digital and creates a bodily and sensory experience.

Poetics of Encryption presents a major survey of work by Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion. The exhibition is brought together by 38 international artists and includes an imaginative landscape where technical systems capture users, work in stealth, and distort cultural space-time. The artists examine our trust in digital tools and how we put our trust ahead of our understanding of the personal and societal effects the digital tools may leave us.

In Poetics of Encryption, Brout and Marion bring thought-provoking works of art containing artistic statements about intelligence, automation bias, information, and power in the 21st century. The exhibition is showcased in the 1000m2 south wing at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

I'm Sorry, This Space is Reserved, is the first group exhibition in the Danish art scene to tell stories of the incapable body. The exhibition is a contribution to the debate on body narratives and aims to break prejudices and barriers through its aesthetics. With a focus on the human body and identity, I’m Sorry, This Space is Reserved dives into different functional variations in the human body. The artists work directly from their personal experiences and perspectives, reflecting upon each other’s bodies. With this exhibition, the artists ask us to enter the dialogue of accessibility and acceptance of people and bodies different than the majority.

The Song Is the call, and the land is calling is a major collaboration between Glyptoteket and Copenhagen Contemporary. Simultaneously taking place at both museums, this joint exhibition re-imagines our contemporary landscape of collective memory. The exhibition is deeply rooted in the history of Palestinian lives and culture, where sound accompanies video installations and sculptural displays. In the center of the exhibition, the artists present a collection of 9,000-year-old Neolithic masks hidden from the public until 2014. The masks re-appear as an act of homecoming to Palestinian culture, as the artists have replicated the masks using 3D-printing technology.

This collaboration between Glyptoteket and Copenhagen Contemporary seeks to revisit antiquity’s cultural heritage and its significance today. 

Beyond Words: Calligraphy from the World of Islam explores the history of calligraphy and calligraphy as an art form. In the Islamic world, inscriptions appear in far more contexts than in most other cultures. We see calligraphy on everything from parchment and paper to everyday objects and buildings. The calligraphic quotations also range from poetic extracts written by famous poets to passages honoring the rulers or owners of the commissioned works as well as texts about the artists themselves and very often we find Koranic quotations.

The exhibition presents 128 individual works, all of which exemplify the importance and role of calligraphy. The audience is introduced to different types of writing and the different usages from official documents to metalwork, ceramics, textiles, and architecture.

In Start Again the Lament, the former underground reservoir, Cisternerne, becomes an instrument echoing recitations of loss with a reverberation of 17 seconds as Taryn Simon broadcasts the lamentations of professional mourners. The public is pulled through Cisternerne by lamentations sonically pushing against its walls in cacophony and silence, and as sound and visiting bodies move through repeating archways, the installation merges darkness and light, absence and presence, singular loss, and its exponential multiplication.

After the Sun is an exhibition created by a diverse group of young artists who present artworks related to nature and climate change. This exhibition aims to let contemporary art reflect how humans are facing future challenges in consideration of how we currently destroy the natural world. The young artists all grew up facing climate change as a life condition. Therefore, they ask us if it is possible to depict nature and landscapes when the imprint of how human life destroys our ecosystems is so obviously present. The exhibtion explores these issues through paintings, sculptures, performances, and video installations. With After the Sun, Gammel Strand draws a portrait of a new generation of Northern artists that may share new perspectives from the climate conditions the artists find themselves in at the Northern latitudes. 

Water is coming is the first major Danish exhibition to present water as an omnipresent, coherent, life-giving substance. The exhibition conveys water as a vital force of all life and human civilization and presents the challenges and resources water has to offer and its destructive potential. The audience may experience the impact of climate change and how it threatens our water systems. The exhibition further displays innovative solutions centered on urban areas, cities, and homes in and outside Denmark. These solutions envision how people might have to adapt to rising sea levels and climate change in the future.

At the exhibition, visitors may also experience elements from the Danish exhibition in the Architecture Biennale, Coastal Imaginaries, which conveys and debates the future coastal protection of the capital area.

The installation, Water Pavilion Ordrupgaard is visible already upon arrival in the foyer. It is built around an oval outline from which numerous jets of water create water walls that alternately rise and fall. The artwork encourages the audience to playfully engage with art and to start a dialogue with each other.

The Water Pavilion forms a spatial constellation where children and adults can feel connected through play. This also applies to those of the visitors who do not already know each other. The collective experience will give rise to new, spontaneous encounters across generations, just as cultural and linguistic barriers will be broken down in the direct sensory encounter with art. In addition, you become aware of your own as well as other people’s boundaries. The water pavilion is an addition to the park’s other works, all created by high-profile contemporary artists with play and interaction in mind.

The Danish visual artist Nina Beier has created an extensive work for Gl. Holtegaard’s more than 30,000 square meter baroque garden.

For the work, Ø, Nina Beier has collected a large number of marble and natural stone slabs, originally carved for kitchens and bathrooms, and placed them in selected areas within Gl. Holtegaard’s baroque garden. Here, the slabs map a global geology and transform the original natural elements into a form of architecture. Over the course of the year, grass will gradually grow through the openings in the stone slabs, creating delimited areas of wild vegetation in clear contrast to the surrounding well-manicured grass and the stones’ polished surfaces.

In the exhibition, Unseen Kapoor gives a sensory form to what we cannot see with our eyes. For example, when water flows into an invisible abyss in Descension (2014) or when he lets us gaze into the dark interior of Memory (2008). Several of the artworks are integrated into the museum's architecture, altering the spaces and interrupting the usual routes through the building. They open new ways of seeing and experiencing the world, and together, they provide a unique insight into Kapoor's artistic production.

The exhibition Danish Modern unfolds the story of Danish design from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing on the creation of some of the most iconic Danish design objects.

The exhibition invites the audience on a design journey from furniture professor Kaare Klint’s ‘Room for a Lady’ to the iconic, groundbreaking German Frankfurt Kitchen – illustrating both differences and similarities between Danish and European modernism – to Verner Panton and Nanna Ditzel’s avant-garde pop designs. In short, a fascinating journey through everything we now know as Danish design icons mixed with unknown designs by well-known designers.