Camille Henrot: Paper Planes

On 5 June, Copenhagen Contemporary opens Paper Planes—Camille Henrot’s largest solo exhibition in Scandinavia to date. Henrot is one of the world's most influential contemporary artists, with a practice spanning film, painting, bronze, drawing, sculpture and installation. Central to the exhibition is the Scandinavian premiere of Henrot’s new film In the Veins—already deemed "an instant classic" by Art in America—alongside major installations spanning the last ten years of her practice and a selection of new works in sculpture and drawing.

A paper becomes a plane
With Paper Planes, Henrot's work looks to the possibilities of counterfactual, non-linear thinking as a way of coping with contemporary existence. In the hands of a child, a piece of paper is never just paper—it is a bird, a map, a weapon, a plane. This is not naïveté but a different mode of processing: open, risk-taking, alive to potentialities that experience and societal codes have not yet ruled out. It is a capacity that most of us unlearn as we move into adulthood—and, Henrot suggests, one we urgently need to reclaim. To care for the world, we must first be able to imagine it differently. Philosopher Ernst Bloch discusses in The Principle of Hope, that reality includes not only what exists, but also what is ”not yet”. Within this ”not-yet” lies the utopian impulse, a force driving humanity’s attempts to rethink and improve our conditions of life. It asks that we remain, like the child, rigorously open to possibility.

Henrot’s many languages
That proposition is one that unfolds in her new film In the Veins (2026), which receives its Scandinavian premiere in Copenhagen. Art in America called it "an instant classic" following its premiere at the New Museum in New York City. Shot in part in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Arizona, the film examines the effect of our awareness of extreme biodiversity loss by interlacing images of wildlife rehabilitation with the daily labour of care for young children. The numbers are stark: according to WWF's Living Planet Report, compiled by the Zoological Society of London, the world's wildlife populations have declined by 73 percent in the last fifty years—yet this loss remains almost invisible as wildlife, by definition, is hard to encounter. In the Veins examines the emotional weight of this loss—what educators and scientists have termed ‘climate grief’—within the framework of the most personal and banal aspects of daily life. Henrot opposes the construct of linear time with that of regenerative, cyclical time, orienting us towards the repetition of day and night, seasons, death and rebirth.

Paper Planes also marks the European debut of two monumental bronze sculptures from Henrot's newest series, Abacus (2023– )—curved rods and movable beads bent into organic, almost bodily forms, questioning whether the systems we use to organise the world are as fixed as we think. The same preoccupation runs through the rest of the exhibition: a series of paintings featuring excerpts from etiquette manuals and the miscellany of everyday life; thirteen leashed dogs standing as a meditation on domestication; two childlike figures balancing on the edge of growth and transformation; and a rotating zoetrope looping endlessly through cycles of need and overconsumption.

With Interphones (2015), interactive telephones offer solutions to intimate everyday problems—a manipulative dog, a possibly unfaithful partner, a conflict with one's father. Automated responses are disguised as empathetic but quickly devolve into an overly intrusive request for personal information. The major installation Office of Unreplied Emails (2016) continues in the same vein: the coercive sentimentality of spam mail messages is laid bare as an endless, one-sided stream of communication that plays on our human emotional response system. Alongside these works, an assemblage of new and recent drawings comments with colourful and humorous expression on our relationship with animals. Through sequences and repetition, we see drawing as a foundational practice of Henrot’s wider oeuvre – a relentless effort to observe, understand and question.

"Camille Henrot is one of the defining artistic voices of her generation—an artist who has succeeded in making the personal political and the intimate universal. With Paper Planes, Copenhagen finally has an exhibition that matches her international significance. Henrot works in a language our time understands: fragmented, overloaded, humorous and deeply serious all at once. This is precisely the voice we need right now," says Marie Laurberg, Director of Copenhagen Contemporary.

About Camille Henrot
Camille Henrot (b. 1978) is recognised as one of the most influential voices in contemporary art today. Over the past twenty years she has developed a critically acclaimed practice and received widespread international recognition, including the prestigious Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale 2013 for the work Grosse Fatigue. Her cross-media practice draws on literature, poetry, social media, self-help and the banalities of everyday life, exploring the complexity of being both an individual and a global citizen in an increasingly connected and overstimulated world. Henrot is interested in systems of rules, structures and codes of conduct—and how to break them. With a rare ability to link the grand sweep of history with the intimate and immediate, she unfolds a sometimes humorous social critique that cements her as an icon of contemporary art.

June 4—free exhibition opening & afterparty
Join us on June 4 to celebrate the opening of Paper Planes with Camille Henrot, who will be present throughout the evening. Admission to Copenhagen Contemporary is free from 5pm. Opening remarks begin at 6pm, after which the doors to the exhibition open for the very first time—your first chance to experience Henrot's world of film, sculpture, painting, bronze and installation. At 8pm, Hall 6 opens for the CC Afterparty with live music from Miaw—also playing Roskilde Festival this year—and further acts to be announced. Entry is free but requires a wristband, available on the day from 5pm—first come, first served.