Three Danish museums open major exhibitions within days of each other this week. The War Museum in Copenhagen starts with SIRIUS – On Patrol in the Arctic on 7 October, Louisiana north of Copenhagen follows with a Tracey Emin exhibition on Thursday 8 October, and Moesgaard near Aarhus opens Maya – The Realm Beneath the Jungle on 9 October.
The Emin exhibition is Louisiana’s second of the autumn, after its show of the Spanish-Mexican surrealist Remedios Varo. Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, textile, film and installation, Emin tells the story of her own life, which has included rape, abortion and serious illness, and of how she survived through her art.
At the War Museum, the SIRIUS exhibition looks at the dog sledge patrol in north-eastern Greenland and its role in the Arctic. Each patrol team is made up of two men, a sledge and 13 dogs. Between them, the teams cover 5,000 kilometres in temperatures that can fall to minus 50C. Moesgaard, the cultural history and archaeology museum south of Aarhus, is focusing on Mayan civilisation and on research breakthroughs that have changed how it is understood, with sections on ruler temples, dense rainforest and corn fields.
Other autumn shows are already open. ARoS in Aarhus has Freedom’s Fall: Art from Germany 1910-1945, more than 70 paintings and sculptures on loan from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin by artists including Otto Dix, Hannah Höch, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Käthe Kollwitz and Emil Nolde, several of them banned or confiscated under the Nazis. In Copenhagen, Glyptoteket’s The Power of Fashion in the Roman Empire covers more than 1,000 square metres, its largest special exhibition on antiquity. It combines Roman sculpture with rare surviving tunics, jewellery, footwear, reconstructed colours and ancient perfume scents, plus listening stations where visitors can hear Roman gossip and insults, and it runs until 29 March 2027.
Smaller venues have new programmes too. Ordrupgaard, in Finn Juhl’s former house north of Copenhagen, is showing The Call of Finland, with paintings by Pekka Halonen, alongside an annual furniture design project that has run since 1981 and this year takes Light & Form as its theme. ARKEN in Ishøj has Animoid by Ann Lislegaard, who uses digital technology and 3D animation in sci-fi-inspired work, and Kunsthal Charlottenborg has new shows by Amalie Smith, Jochen Lempert and Som Supaparinya until 21 February.
