The Five Best Exhibitions to See at CHART

Roni Horn | Louisiana Museum of Modern Art  | 2 May – 1 September 

Named after a lesser-known gouache on paper the artist painted the mid-1980s, Roni Horn’s solo show, ‘The Detour of Identity’, takes classic cinema as a framing device to highlight the subtle eroticism and interest in gender identity that permeates the New York-based artist’s practice. Each room includes a scene from an iconic film by a legendary director like Ingmar Bergman, Carl Theodor Dreyer or Alfred Hitchcock alongside Horn’s own work, encouraging the viewer to search for visual or thematic echoes of the selected films in the photographs, sculptures and drawings on view. For instance, Horn’s images of swirling bodies of water, such as Some Thames (2000), hang beside a clip of Judy Barton (Kim Novak) jumping into San Francisco Bay in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Lining the walls are a number of Horn’s self-portraits followed by portraits of the French actor Isabelle Huppert, connected by a looped scene from Bergman’s avant-garde psychological drama Persona (1966). As the exhibition progresses, the associations between Horn’s works and the selected films becomes less evident. The show concludes with a series of circular, cast-glass sculptures, in yellow and green hues, that looks like manicured ice cubes that graze the floor’s surface (Untitled, 2023). These are juxtaposed with a close-up of the face of Joan of Arc (Renée Jeanne Falconetti) from Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) after she is told she will be burnt at the stake.

Anna Dickinson | von Bartha | 1 August – 19 October

Glass sculpture also takes centre stage in Anna Dickinson’s exhibition at von Bartha’s Copenhagen space. Nestled inside the 19th-century gatehouse of the former Carlsberg brewery, ‘Sentient / Forms’ is the London-based artist’s first solo show in the Nordic region. Dickinson recently evolved her sculptural practice after suffering a stroke four years ago and undergoing complex surgery, during which coils were implanted into her brain via an artery in her leg. Each sculpture, including Large Glass with Rods and Large Glass with Tubes (all works 2024), comprises a glass cylinder populated with various combinations of glass or steel tubes and rods. The effect is that of a biological cell or a wire-filled network cable that has been sliced open. From afar, Dickinson’s works look machinic and easily replicable; upon closer observation, however, we note slight imperfections in their surfaces that the artist has chosen to keep – a subtle nod to their corporeal inspiration.

Karl Monies | Etage Projects | 22 August – 19 October 

Focused on artists who work between art and design, Etage Projects is an emphatically interdisciplinary space hosting exhibitions that would be equally at home in a design museum or a white cube gallery. Karl Monies – the Danish artist behind the lamps, quilts and ceramics currently on view – said it best in a 2021 Wallpaper article: ‘Why can’t art be made with a function, or why can’t a utilitarian object be imbued with a philosophical, conceptual or existential meaning, related or unrelated to its functional purpose?’ Titled ‘MACRO’, Monies’s show takes inspiration from the mysterious properties of fungi. In a new series of differently sized and variously oxidised, mushroom-shaped copper lamps, the artist simulates bioluminescence in an attempt to evoke the sensations that these psychedelic plants can release. Each lamp, titled BL for bonum lumen or bioluminescence (all works 2024), rests on a rectangular bed of mossy plants conceived by garden designer Anna Sofie Jacobsen, which serves as a frame on the floor, turning the gallery into a garden. Are these artworks to be looked at or design objects to be used? Monies never gives us an answer.

Tania Perez Córdova | NILS STÆRK | 23 August – 19 October 

Mexican artist Tania Perez Córdova’s ‘Our Normal Life’ looks at how the climate crisis can be traced in everyday items. Works such as Brain (2024), in which she compresses a pile of her child’s outgrown clothes into the titular shape, repurpose found objects into new symbols. Dividing the room into two like a thin skin is a translucent white mesh panel flecked with pieces of shredded paper that contain the remnants of personal data (Name, Phone, Email, Postcode, 2023). Installed throughout the rest of the space are works that appear to gasp for clean air to breathe. Lungs (2024), for instance, features a vacuum packing bag and a pillow compressed within a cast-aluminium form to look like the titular organ. Here, the air contained within the bag is also part of the sculpture. Recycling mundane materials – clothing, papers, bags – Córdova makes artworks that depict organs and bodily functions as metaphors for the biological systems that humanity has put under threat.

Post Human | Galleri Nicolai Wallner | 23 August – 12 October 

In 1993, Jeffrey Deitch curated the landmark exhibition ‘Post Human’ at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, which posited a new type of art for a new sort of human: one who embraced artificiality – be that computerized intelligence or plastic surgery – to blur the line between the organic and inorganic. Danish art dealer Nicolai Wallner saw the exhibition just six months before launching his own gallery. Now, more than 30 years after that life-altering experience, Wallner is staging his own show titled ‘Post Human’, which features five young artists – Kinga Bartis, Julie Falk, Hannah Levy, Rasmus Myrup and Eva Helene Pade – who explore unconventional reworkings of the human body. From Levy’s sinewy, stainless-steel and glass sculpture that recalls a pregnant figure (Untitled, all works 2024) to Pade’s painterly, energetic group portrait of women’s detached heads absorbed in conversation (Morgen), the works on view merely allude to the body, allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks.

_{Main image: Anna Dickinson, ‘Sentient / Forms’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and von Bartha, Copenhagen; photograph: Fritz Buziek}