COPENHAGEN.- Copenhagen Contemporary revealed its exhibition program for 2026.
Exhibitions expanding into 2026
CC Create x Monster Chetwynd—A Feather In Your Hat
April 13, 2025–March 1, 2026
In 2025, CC launched a brand-new education concept, CC Create. Unfolding in an 800 square meter open studio, the world-renowned British performance artist Monster Chetwynd (b. 1973) is the first artist in the program. Chetwynd transformed the studio into a spectacular universe, where visitors can express their creativity and engage in collective learning through play and artistic exploration inspired by the artist’s own methods.
Monster Chetwynd’s practice spans installation, performance, film, and painting. Their work is famously playful and effervescent, mixing the glamorous, grotesque, and nightmarish. Chetwynd invites visitors to take part in collaborative projects that blur conventional boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience.
Soft Robots—The Art of Digital Breathing
June 20, 2025–April 19, 2026
Why does new technology give rise to both hope and fear? The relationship between humans and technology is one of the great dramas of the modern age, often portraying machines as either saviours overcoming human limitations or monsters threatening our existence. Contemporary artists are developing increasingly complex visions, showing humans, technology, animals, and plants operating in symbiotic constellations.
The critically acclaimed exhibition features Danish and international artists presenting different visions for synthetic biologies and their potential connections to spirituality. Exploring life-like technology as a human analogue, Soft Robots offers a poetic reflection on the implications of technology for life, nature, and our broader existence.
Alia Farid—The Sounding of the Earth
October 2, 2025–March 23, 2026
In the fall of 2025, Glyptotek and CC presented the first solo exhibition in Denmark by Kuwaiti/Puerto Rican artist Alia Farid. The exhibition is the third and final component of the series Hosting Histories—Revisiting Cultural Heritage of the Middle East and Beyond (2023–25), developed in collaboration between Glyptotek and CC.
Farid explores the relationship between industrial practices and hand-made objects as a method of critical inquiry into being and belonging amid global precarity. Whether through enlarged amulets combining ancient and modern materials or films documenting the ecological impact of extractive industries in the Arab Gulf region, her work challenges colonial narratives and examines how materials and forms transmute across time and space.
New exhibitions opening in 2026
CC10 Festival
January 23–25, 2026
Copenhagen Contemporary marks its tenth anniversary with a three-day celebration of art, creativity, and community. The iconic halls at Refshaleøen are transformed into an open field for experiments, encounters, and artistic visions, inviting audiences to participate actively.
International and local artists present performances, sound and video works, concerts, dance, and workshops throughout the building, creating unexpected encounters, dialogue, and reflection.
Set within CC’s monumental industrial architecture, the event becomes a social and visionary space where art explores new ways of living, creating, and coexisting, inviting visitors to engage, be inspired, and imagine the future together.
CCreate x Kengo Kuma/KKAA—Earth I Tree
March 29, 2026–February 21, 2027
In 2026, Copenhagen Contemporary continues its CC Create program with a site-specific architectural installation by internationally acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma (b. 1954). Renowned for his sensitivity to natural materials, light, and spatial atmosphere, Kuma’s work embodies a philosophy of “gentle architecture,” creating spaces in dialogue with their surroundings. Inspired by the Japanese concept komorebi — sunlight filtering through leaves — the installation invites poetic and immersive experiences.
For Hall 4, Kengo Kuma & Associates (KKAA), led by Yuki Ikeguchi, designed an enveloping structure that embraces Japanese and Nordic appreciation towards nature and the materials, prominently featuring wood and brick. Visitors are encouraged to explore and engage with the space through workshops and activities that reveal the creative methods behind architectural design. The project marks a new phase in CC Create, dissolving boundaries between art, architecture, and education, and offering an interactive environment where light, form, and material inspire reflection.
The installation coincides with the opening of the Water Culture House on Papirøen, also designed by KKAA, providing a unique opportunity to experience his architectural vision across multiple contexts.
Shapeshifters. Magic in Fashion
June 25–September 13, 2026
Shapeshifters. Magic in Fashion brings together 11 Nordic fashion designers and artists working at the intersection of fashion, art, and performance. Through new and existing works, they explore the ritualistic and transformative potential of clothing, showing how garments can mark life transitions, blur boundaries between reality and imagination, and create new narratives and communities.
Representing a diverse Nordic generation with global outlooks and experiences shaped by migration and cultural exchange, the artists engage with themes of heritage, spirituality, loss, healing, and transformation. Attuned to both culture and nature—the visible and the hidden—they use the magic of fashion to challenge conventions and rethink identity.
The exhibition is developed in collaboration with Ane Lynge-Jorlén (ALPHA) and forms part of a Nordic partnership between EMMA (Finland), the National Museum (Norway), Röhsska Museum (Sweden), and Copenhagen Contemporary (Denmark).
Camille Henrot
June 4–December 31, 2026
In 2026, Copenhagen Contemporary presents the first in a new series of solo exhibitions dedicated to leading international contemporary artists, featuring the acclaimed French artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978). Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, and video, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging introduction to her practice and is Henrot’s largest solo presentation in Scandinavia.
Henrot is considered one of the most influential contemporary artists today and gained major international recognition when receiving the Silver Lion at the 2013 Venice Biennale for her film Grosse Fatigue. Her cross-disciplinary practice draws on literature, social media, self-help, and everyday life to explore how we navigate an increasingly connected and overstimulated world, often with a sharp and humorous eye for social norms, labels, and systems.
At CC, Henrot presents a performative survey—central to the exhibition is the Scandinavian premiere of her new film In The Veins (2025), developed over five years as a reflection on care, change, and the paradox of raising children amid ecological crisis and technological dependence. Across media, the exhibition explores the emotional landscape of a world marked by delegated care, technological systems, and environmental uncertainty.
Fire & Ice
September 10–December 31, 2026
Fire & Ice gathers contemporary voices from the Arctic and explores cultural and geographic belonging through works that draw on lived experience. The exhibition revisits narratives shaped by a colonial gaze, and themes such as identity, trauma, nature and cultural resilience unfold in works that move between the personal and the political.
Created in close collaboration with artists the exhibition spans visual art, performance and activism, tracing links between individuals and history, landscape and belonging, modernity and resistance. At a moment when the Arctic is shaped by global interests, Fire & Ice supports artists from the Arctic region as authors of their own images and narratives, and invites reflection on colonial heritage, the climate crisis and cultural self representation.
