CHART is the leading event for contemporary art in the Nordic region. Based in Copenhagen, this weekend it presents the twelfth edition of the art fair with a series of extra events across the city. Focused at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, this year also marks the tenth anniversary of CHART Architecture, an annual open call architectural competition for emerging architecture firms and recent graduates to design a temporary pavilion in the central courtyard of the Baroque palace along celebrated Nyhavn waterway.

An expert jury selects the winning pavilion, with previous winning designs including nature covered shacks, sales booths, playful pavilions, inflatable spaces, and plant-infused seating areas. There is no single function, but each year asks for a different brief resulting in each CHART offering unexpected and playful pop-up architectures for art visitors and the public beyond.



This year’s winning entry is designed by Emil Dupuis Bernild, Mikkel Harboe Wolff, Jonas Sarantaris, and Shwan Soran Ali as an exhibition space challenging the traditional white cube model of display. Their winning design, now erected within a corner of the palace courtyard, is a 12 metre squared flexible walling system that can easily be demounted and erected elsewhere for another time and event.

Named Breeze, the primary material is formed of screw-free standard timber panels, with a roof formed of sails rippling above, with local stones as foundational support. All these materials can be reused either in their current form or for new projects, an important element of the design as CHART is a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition.



The sails allow a warm, romantic light to filter upon works presented for Start Collecting with CHART, where galleries have selected works at a price point suitable for those interested in starting a collection, while hundreds of small lights are positioned around the space, allowing rich lighting to fill the space even after the Nordic sun sets.

A wrap-around fabric screen is held in place through a jute rope system that can lower down to offer a secure threshold to the space when it is not in use. This section of CHART, in the publicly accessible courtyard, is free to access and offers an introduction not only to collecting but the language and architecture of the larger art fair, into which visitors may then go on to visit, if not this year then next.




CHART also reaches new audiences beyond the palace with a series of site-specific works around Copenhagen’s famed Tivoli Gardens. Tivoli is a fantastical space of escape and pleasure in the centre of the city, an amusement park packed with rides directly influenced from London’s Vauxhall Gardens, for two hundred years Europe’s first and leading pleasure park. Opening in 1843, Tivoli is the third oldest still-open amusement park in the world, and visitors to it this weekend will find sculpture is added to the attention-battling mix of architecture, rides, and excitement in the compact park.

The small works scattered across Tivoli, some of which are so discreet they need to be hunted down, include a glazed ceramic by Anselm Reyle’s that reflects the energy of the funfair and Michael Johansson’s Real Life Tetris collage of everyday objects secreted within the entrance of Tivoli’s 1914-built wooden rollercoaster. A Maria Rubinke patinated bronze sculpture reads like a ruined, burnt shell of a park bench while Peter Frie’s bronze sculpture Tree, sits like a celebrated lump of organic matter upon a steel pedestal.




The whole CHART event is themed around New Voices in the Nordics, designed to create a space for the next generation of artists to be seen and develop new audiences. Exhibited work will run alongside a public programme of talks, panel discussions, performances, screenings and more, while the inaugural Print & Book Fair brings a new addition to the event.