Copenhagen Contemporary Exhibition Program 2025

At Copenhagen Contemporary, we are excited to welcome you to a year filled with exceptional art experiences. Featuring several new exhibitions made especially for CC, the 2025 spring season unfolds as an exploration of the artist as thinker or philosopher. Not philosophy in the traditional sense, as articulated in writing, but a philosophy of images, materials and textures.

We are interested in art as a way of understanding the world. By poetic means, artists strive to communicate their view of the world. Not to describe it but to explore it, challenging what we know about the world and proposing new visions of how it might look. In the space of art, reality is elastic. Art reveals how the world can be seen from multiple perspectives and be transformed in new directions. In turn, it inspires us to action.

Emma Talbot will present her first major solo exhibition in Denmark. In monumental, hand-painted silk panels, the British artist creates contemporary tapestries, mythological maps of today’s world where our relationship to nature and its resources is in profound crisis. This is the backdrop for a human figure navigating among giant insects and other animals she might inhabit. What is the world like seen through the eyes of a dog?

Summer kicks off with Soft Robots, a big group show inviting artists to each share a distinctive project exploring the porous boundaries between humans, nature and technology. Several of the artworks highlight the human voice and breath, insisting on biological life and resisting our hyper-technological world.

Alia Farid is the third artist in an exhibition series merging contemporary art and cultural heritage, co-produced by CC and the Glyptotek. Farid’s work deals with natural resources in a geopolitical perspective, where water is weaponised in political struggles and conflict.

In 2025, we are also launching CC Create, our innovative new education concept. The first artist to be featured is the pioneering performance artist Monster Chetwynd. Every year, an international artist will transform CC’s Hall 4 into an 800 m2 open studio. Visitors can engage in creative processes inspired by the artist’s own practice and approach to creating something new. Hall 4 once served as a studio for set painters from the Royal Theatre. It will now be turned back into a studio – a new, experimental space opening a window into the artist’s process. The project is part of a cohesive vision to teach creative methods. In Monster Chetwynd’s hands, the studio will become a Dionysian paradise.

Welcome to CC!
Marie Laurberg, Director

Current exhibitions

Marta Minujín
Intensify Life
Closes 21 April 2025

Intensify Life will be on view at CC throughout the spring. The critically acclaimed exhibition by the Argentine superstar Marta Minujín has been called “startling and enchanting” (Kulturkupeen) and “just the show we didn’t know we needed” (Kunstkritikk).

Taking up CC’s two biggest halls, the exhibition showcases the rare, soft fluorescent paintings and collages that have been Minujín’s signature since the 1960s, when she broke through with her singular take on Pop art steeped in the vibrant street life of Buenos Aires. The artist has also recreated several of her standout installations specifically for CC. La Menesunda (1965), a giant labyrinth, is one of the first immersive installations in art history. In 11 different rooms, the labyrinth leads you through a swamp, a neon-lit street smelling of fried chicken and in and out of Minujín’s head, complete with a fully operational beauty salon. Prepare to be beguiled, challenged and elated by Minujín’s inimitable style.

La Menesunda: According to Marta Minujín is organized in collaboration with Tate Liverpool and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and will tour Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.

Project Art Works
Residential
Closes 9 March 2025

During their time at CC, the British artist and activist collective Project Artworks has been working both in CCs Hall 4 and behind the scenes. Residential features selected works created as part of the collective’s 20-year effort promoting opportunities for marginalised groups to express themselves through art and creativity. Visitors are invited to try out the collective’s methods. The group has worked closely with CC’s team to develop a new art-education method for people with complex care needs to receive instruction in art and creativity through dedicated workshops at CC. The effort reflects CC’s desire to expand our engagement with new communities, giving more people access to art on their terms.

James Turrell
Aftershock
Newly acquired permanent installation

Aftershock, the powerful light installation by the American artist James Turrell, now has a permanent home at CC. Acquired in 2024, it marks the establishment of CC’s 21st Century Collection.

Aftershock is an immersive installation made specifically for CC by the American light artist James Turrell. When your eyes are exposed to a torrent of colour, your brain starts hallucinating as it struggles to make sense of an infinite colour field. It is a major work by the artist and his only one that employs strobe lighting.

Aftershock creates an experience of disorientation. The edges of the room blur, and you begin to question whether your eyes are open or closed.

Turrell describes his works as vessels for light, where light and colour are perceived as physical materials. His practice explores light as both a physical and a metaphorical presence that defines human perception and our experience of the world.

New exhibitions opening in 2025

Emma Talbot
7 February – 31 August 2025

Opening the spring season, CC presents the first major Scandinavian solo exhibition by British artist Emma Talbot (b. 1969) featuring both new and existing works. Exploring themes of rebirth, transformation, sustainability and human resilience amid systemic ecological collapse the exhibition reflects on life’s cyclical nature and poses the question: “Are we a living thing that is dying, or a dying thing that is living?”

Comprising drawing, large-scale silk paintings, three-dimensional objects and animation Talbot’s work bridges the personal and the universal. By combining autobiography, memory, psychological projections, feminist theory, ecopolitics and storytelling with introspective explorations of the artist’s personal thoughts, emotions, and self-narratives, Talbot engages in asking pertinent questions about our ever-changing world – not least about humanity’s relationship with nature and the environment.

Rendered in captivating palettes of deep purples, rusty ochres, soft pinks, and bright greens, Talbot’s painterly surfaces are inhabited by ethereal, human-like figures and personified animals navigating uncharted landscapes. From these entangled cosmoses, Talbot challenges viewers to deepen their connection with the earth and reconsider their place in an interconnected universe, suggesting that human survival may rely on harmonizing with nature’s timeless, self-sustaining cycles.

CC Create x Monster Chetwynd
13 April 2025 – 16 August 2026

In 2025, CC is launching a brand new education concept, CC Create, transforming CC’s Hall 4 into an 800 m² open studio for all our visitors. At one point in its history, the hall was used as a studio for set painters from the Royal Theatre. The space will now return to a creative studio buzzing with production. In 2025, the world-renowned British performance artist Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973) will turn the hall into a spectacular universe, where visitors can express their creativity and engage in collective learning through play and artistic exploration inspired by Chetwynd’s own method. CC’s Create project reflects a cohesive vision to promote the creative self-esteem of kids and teens in a highly collaborative setting. Specially trained facilitators will be on hand to help visitors get started.

Chetwynd’s art practice spans a variety of media, including installation, performance, film and painting. The artist’s work is famously playful and effervescent, mixing the glamorous, grotesque and nightmarish. Chetwynd and their performers hand-fabricate costumes, masks, props and set designs, often from recycled materials, embracing a DIY aesthetic. Chetwynd invites visitors to take part in collaborative projects bursting the conventional boundaries between artists, artwork and audience.

The exhibition at CC will feature a monstrous installation focusing on collaborative co-creation, giving visitors a chance to make their mark in all sorts of ways.

Cecilia Fiona
Ghost Flower Ritual
10 April – 19 April 2025

In an era of accelerating biodiversity loss, countless plant and flower species are vanishing at an alarming rate. How might we retell their stories and honor their significance? If these lost species could return as embodied beings, what messages would they carry for the future?

Throughout Easter, CC will present Ghost Flower Ritual, a new cross-disciplinary performance project conceived by Danish visual artist Cecilia Fiona (b. 1997) in collaboration with composer Sophie Søs Meyer (b. 1991) and the Athelas Sinfonietta classical music ensemble. The project unfolds as an immersive sensory installation that combines painting, sculpture, costumes, music, and dance, brought to life through a series of live concert performances.

Ghost Flower Ritual is inspired by an alchemical myth about a scientist who burns a flower, only to witness it sprouting anew from its ashes. Fiona’s sculptures, paintings and costumes will be activated by musicians and performers, inviting audiences to experience an occult ritual that intertwines flower spirits, the biodiversity crisis, and the hope of resurrection.

Ghost Flower Ritual will premiere at CC on 10 April 2025 and be performed live on another six occasions. The performance runs about 45 minutes.

Performance dates and times:

• Saturday 12 April, 14:00 and 16:00
• Thursday 17 April, 18:00 and 20:00
• Saturday 19 April, 14:00 and 16:00

Book your ticket here: https://copenhagencontemporary... Tickets include admission to CC.

Soft Robots
20 June – 31 December 2025

Why does new technology give rise to so much hope and fear? The relationship between humans and technology is one of the great dramas of the modern age, often featuring the machine as either a saviour overcoming human limitations or a monster threatening our existence. Artists today are developing new and more complex visions showing humans, technology, animals and plants operating in symbiotic constellations. Exploring this perspective, the Soft Robots exhibition features Danish and international artists presenting their visions for a new synthetic biology and its potential connections to spirituality.

The concept of the exhibition is inspired by The Nightingale (1843), the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale contrasting a mechanical (robotic) bird with the natural, enlivening song of a real nightingale. Pan-Asian philosophies of life dissolve this dualism, as the notion of objects having a soul opens the door to a closer connection between technology and biology. The works and practices presented in the exhibition reflect and cut across these positions. Examining the idea of life-like technology as a human replica, Soft Robots paints a poetic picture of the implications of technology in our life, nature and being in the world.

The exhibition features new works by international artists Joan Heemskerk and Alice Bucknell, both selected from Collide, CC’s international open-call residency partnership with Arts at CERN.

Alia Farid
3 October 2025 – 23 March 2026

Slated for fall 2025, Glyptotek and Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Denmark by artist Alia Farid. The exhibition is the third and final component of an ambitious series of exhibitions titled Hosting Histories - Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond (2023-2025) developed in conjunction between Glyptotek and CC.

Alia Farid (b.1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. Her work explores the relationship of industrial practices and hand-made objects as a method of critical inquiry into the experience of being and belonging amid global precarity. Whether sculptures of drinking fountains in the shape of water vessels, enlarged amulets combining ancient and modern materials, or films witnessing the ecological consequences of extractive industries in the Global South, her work pushes against colonial narratives and explores how materials and forms transmute across time and space.