Exhibition Program 2024

Copenhagen Contemporary is delighted to present their 2024 program unfolding a variety of distinctive and inspiring art.

The year kicks off with a wide-ranging exhibition by the international art-world star Kapwani Kiwanga, and a spectacular show introducing new sides of the Danish painter Cathrine Raben Davidsen. In the spring, CC will break the boundaries of art education when the experimental artists’ collective Project Art Works transforms one of CC’s huge halls into an open studio inviting everyone to unleash their creativity. In the summer, the American-Palestinian artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will present the second part of Hosting Histories, a series of exhibitions on archaeology and the importance of cultural heritage today, presented in collaboration with the Glyptotek. Our big fall event is a major exhibition by the Argentine Pop artist Marta Minujín, the first retrospective showing by this living legend in Europe. Also in the spring, families can continue to visit the hit exhibition by Jakob Martin Strid and explore Hannah Toticki’s exhibition Storage of the Gods, while James Turrell’s big light installation Aftershock will remain on view all year.

Marie Laurberg, Director of CC, says,

“In a time when so much culture is experienced through screens, we take pride in being a physical location in the city – a place for art and a place for people to meet. CC’s guests and members can look forward to exploring exhibitions unfolding the most vital and generous aspects of contemporary art: labyrinthine installations, lush material surfaces containing hidden stories, electronic beats, critical writings and magical paintings that keep growing the more time you spend with them.”

The year at CC will feature not only exhibitions but also creative studios and workshops for all ages. Cocktails & Curator combines drinks with thrilling behind-the-scenes stories from the world of art, while the new format known as CC Engagement will present engaging social debate, as Emma Holten hosts newsworthy guests and invites the audience to ask questions.

Read more about the exhibitions below.

26 January – 25 August 2024
Kapwani Kiwanga
The Length of the Horizon

Lurking just beneath the surface in Kapwani Kiwanga's (b. 1978) seductively beautiful works are serious concerns. Plants tell toxic stories of power imbalances and history. Colours contain manipulative effects and light is investigated as a political instrument. In her installations, paintings and sculptures, Kiwanga, who has a degree in anthropology and comparative religion, heightens our awareness of hidden social mechanisms and power structures.

Kiwanga considers the power of colour, light and materials as a way to tell stories with a global outlook. The Length of the Horizon is the first major exhibition in Scandinavia for the artist who has won numerous international awards for her singular body of work. Moreover, Kiwanga has been selected to create the Canadian pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale.

This exhibition is created in partnership with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany, and is accompanied by a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Cecilia Alemani, Uta Ruhkamp, Julie Pellegrin, Andreas Beitin and Marie Laurberg.

26 January – 12 May 2024
Cathrine Raben Davidsen
Let Everything Happen to You

Let Everything Happen to You is the first major institutional solo exhibition by the Danish artist Cathrine Raben Davidsen (b. 1972). Shining a retrospective light on the artist's emotional complexity and range, it tracks the evolution of her work over three decades shaped by experiences of loss, the search for identity and transformation. The exhibition encompasses more than 120 works, many of which have never been shown before.

Let Everything Happen to You presents raw, atmospheric charcoal and ink drawings alongside richly layered oil paintings tapping into stories spanning the past and present, personal memories and ancient mythologies, geopolitical events and art-historical references. At the heart of the work is the artistic treatment of humanity and personal experience. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to experience some of Raben Davidsen’s earliest work. Executed in a raw, psychological style, her Family series portrays her childhood and teenage years, including the devastating loss of her father to AIDS when she was 13.

Later in her career, subjects like landscapes, animals and plants start appearing in Raben Davidsen’s paintings, as her focus shifts from personal exploration to more universal questions of human existence, communion with nature and the concept of metamorphosis. Over the years, Raben Davidsen has also been taking a more critical and political position, as seen in her latest paintings, abstract depictions of landscapes transformed and bodies disfigured by war.

27 April – 31 December 2024
Project Art Works
Residential

For Residential, the British organization and artists’ collective Project Art Works will transform CC’s Hall 4 into a 1,000 m² art studio for our guests. Over the last 25 years, Project Art Works has explored art practices for neurodiverse people. A large collaborative project, the installation will constantly be evolving, featuring an aesthetically inviting space with artworks from the organization’s collection and a studio where guests are welcome to join in the art-making process. Specially designed workshops will be held over the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition is part of the CC’s new initiative CC Create, which focuses on strengthening well-being by supporting the creativity of the individual and in society.

Project Art Works participated in Documenta 15 in Kassel, in summer 2022, and in recent years has worked with numerous art institutions in Europe, most recently the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and Tate Liverpool.

14 June – 24 November 2024
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme

In June 2024, CC and the Glyptotek will open a major solo exhibition with the international artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Since 2007, Basel Abbas (b. 1983) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983) have developed an internationally renowned body of work across video, sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Through immersive and multi-layered media installations, the artist duo stimulates body and mind as they re-imagine our contemporary landscape of politics and poetics, past and present.

Adapting sampling techniques prevalent in London’s drum and bass scene of the 1990s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme creates soundtracks that are accompanied by striking images layered with quotes from critical and poetic texts in Arabic and English. The artists often refer to their works as ‘poetics of resistance’ – a resistance that is at once universal and also rooted in the personal backgrounds of the artists, both of whom belong to the Palestinian diaspora. Central to their practice is an ongoing concern for how communities can mobilise hope and create counter-narratives within oppressive political systems. With their visually impressive and engaging works, Abbas and Abou-Rahme narrate mediated experiences of violence, loss, displacement, hope and community in which new aesthetic and political possibilities can arise.

The joint exhibition takes place at both institutions simultaneously and presents several of the artists’ key works in new iterations. The exhibition is the second in the series of the three-year collaboration between CC and the Glyptotek titled Hosting Histories: Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond, which seeks to revisit the cultural heritage of antiquity and its significance today.

10 October 2024 – 21 April 2025
Marta Minujín
Intensify Life

CC’s big fall exhibition is the first European retrospective of the pioneering Argentine Pop artist Marta Minujín (b. 1943). An iconic figure, Minujín is one of the most prominent Latin American Pop and conceptual artists ever. Over the last six decades, her happenings, performances, installations and videos have influenced generations of artists in Latin America, as well as the US and Europe.

Eclectically combining elements of experimental theatre, pop-culture films, television and ads, Minujín creates immersive environments locating the viewer at the centre of social situations confronting us with the seductive power of media images. In sensuous, psychedelic and ephemeral expressions merging humour and political criticism, her art employs Pop art’s signature play with the symbols of consumerism and mass culture.

The centrepiece of the exhibition, La Menesunda (1965), is one of the earliest examples of installation art in history. Minujín’s magnum opus is a labyrinthine installation devised as a fanciful journey through Buenos Aires. Across 11 rooms, the viewer encounters a neon-lit street, a swamp, a beauty salon with a nail technician offering manicures, a bedroom with a slumbering couple and the occasional aroma of fried chicken. Named after the local slang word for chaos, the work is inspired by the buzzing Buenos Aires street life.

The exhibition will feature a wide and varied selection of the artist’s work alongside archive materials that CC was given unique access to through their close collaboration with the artist. Created in partnership with the Museo Moderno in Argentina, Intensify Life will later travel to the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Tate Liverpool and KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels.

For more information about CC’s exhibition program 2024, please contact:
Marie Laurberg, Director
marielaurberg@cphco.org
+45 3017 1404

Press Contact:
Ida Maj Ludvigsen, Head of PR & Communication
ida@cphco.org
+45 6021 9321

DOWNLOAD PRESS MATERIAL HERE: https://copenhagencontemporary.org/en/press/