Camille Henrot’s new exhibition opens in Copenhagen with the Scandinavian premiere of ‘In the Veins’

From June 5th to December 31st, 2026, Copenhagen Contemporary presents Paper Planes, a major solo exhibition by Camille Henrot and her most extensive presentation in Scandinavia to date. Spanning film, sculpture, drawing, painting and installation, the project traces fragile states of attention, care, and the shifting emotional terrain of contemporary life.

At its centre is In the Veins (2026), Henrot’s new film, already called “an instant classic” by Art in America. The work receives its Scandinavian premiere in Copenhagen, anchoring one of the season’s most closely watched exhibitions.

A Camille Henrot exhibition about possibility and fragility

With Paper Planes, Camille Henrot turns to non-linear thinking—the capacity to drift beyond fixed structures of reality. The title, drawn from the simple childhood act of folding paper into flight, becomes a lens on imagination as endurance, escape, and resistance.

Across the exhibition, Henrot threads together daily gestures, emotional labour, and systems of care, exposing the quiet frameworks that shape how people live together. Sculptures, drawings, and immersive environments sit alongside one another, probing social order while staying rooted in intimate routines and ordinary rituals.

Key works include monumental bronze pieces from the Abacus series, the participatory installation Interphones (2015), and Office of Unreplied Emails (2016), where automated language drifts into emotional excess. Paintings drawn from etiquette manuals, animal-filled sketches, and a revolving zoetrope extend her interest in repetition, domestication, and consumption pushed to saturation.

In the Veins

At the heart of the exhibition, In the Veins addresses parenthood, ecological rupture, and the emotional weight of the climate crisis. Shot across Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Arizona, the film weaves together wildlife rehabilitation and the intimate rhythms of raising children.

Environmental collapse is not kept at a distance; it enters domestic space, where care becomes both necessity and pressure. Animals—once carriers of childhood fantasy—appear as vanishing presences, heightening the tension between imagination and lived reality.

Structured through cycles of day and night, growth and erosion, exhaustion and return, the film holds care as an active condition rather than a passive state. In Henrot’s work, it reads as persistence—a way of staying attached to life even as it shifts, frays, and resists stability.