CHART in Tivoli is an off-site contemporary art exhibition that takes place in the iconic Tivoli Gardens amusement park every summer, in collaboration with leading galleries from across the Nordics. The exhibition lasts for one month, opens the same week as CHART and then remains open to the public until Tivoli closes for the season towards the end of September.

By placing artworks within the historic amusement park context, the exhibition offers a new opportunity to broaden the audience for contemporary art, while allowing people to encounter contemporary art in a relaxed environment where curiosity, fun, and exploration are actively encouraged. As Tivoli continues to be one of Copenhagen's most symbolic cultural locations, the exhibition also aims to inspire new collaborations across Copenhagen's cultural scenes and to expand the format for what an art fair can be.

CHART in Tivoli 2024 exhibition presented an inspiring and interactive art experience to all of Tivoli’s guests, both in the gardens and online. An audio guide, produced especially for the occasion, offers unique thoughts and perspectives on each artwork, in the artist's own words.

Anslem Reyle (DE); David Nilson (SE); Jacob Dahlgren (SE); Jens Settergren (DK); Julie Falk (DK); Laura Guiseppi (DK); Maria Rubinke (DK); Matti Sumari (FI); Michael Johansson (SE); Morten Buch (DK); Per Kirkeby (DK); Peter Frie (SE); Rose Eken (DK).

Anna Fernsten Nilén Curated the 3rd edition of CHART in Tivoli, developing an audience-friendly curatorial strategy that invited deeper engagement with the works. The program featured a digital map and a series of artist-produced audioguides, offering Tivoli guests new ways to experience the installations.

Photo: Laura Guiseppi, Retainer Bodies, 2024

Courtesy of the artist, Lagune Ouest and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Tellus Luna, 2024

Tellus Luna is a sculpture in the shape of a lamppost. The round shade is partly concave and changes with the motion of the viewer. From a certain angle, the silhouette of a moon occurs, which during the dark hours colours the surroundings with its shine. David Nilson’s series of moons carried by a lamppost has been ongoing since he graduated from Malmö Art Academy in 2013. The early monochrome colours have since then developed with his intuitive and vibrant painted tones. But the almost Magrittean scene that occurs in front of our eyes is still there.

The work is represented in both public and private collections in Sweden and Europe. It was also included in the exhibition The Romantic Eye at the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, SE.

Photo: David Nilson, Tellus Luna, 2024

Courtesy of the artist, Galleri Arnstedt and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

I am Threshold, 2024

Sumari’s artistic interventions often extend to the exterior of exhibition spaces - to the public realm: A strange, humanoid figure sprouts from pre-existing bike racks. Our daily use of utilitarian objects is once again called into question when confronted by the enlarged extra-terrestrial, its reflective eyes forged from the aforementioned hammered metal. A silhouette with lobster-like bifurcated limbs. Crustaceans, aliens and androids aside, this spindly, slenderman shape is in fact the copy of a seaweed fragment (blæretang) that the artist found over half a decade ago. This sentimental - almost ceremonial - talisman has traveled with Sumari ever since and remains a recurring allegorical or anthropomorphic concern within his practice.

Photo: Matti Sumari, I am Threshold, 2024. Illegal catering kitchen

Courtesy of the artist, Galleri Cora Hillebrand and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Rose, 2024

For CHART in Tivoli 2024 V1 Gallery is pleased to present a group of sculptures by Rose Eken (b. 1976). In the context of Tivoli Garden, Eken’s bronze sculptures are juxtaposed with the living garden as their dark counterparts. Eken’s upward-spiraling plants defy expectations, simultaneously mourning and celebrating humanity’s fractured connection with the earth. Eken’s plants strain between matter and form. Deadly nightshade, entangled roses, and dying sunflowers. So appealing in their labored intent to defy gravity, but all of them were deadly poisonous or slowly decaying.

Eken’s work often mines the world of the everyday, while simultaneously veering into a parallel world of darkness and broken connections. The works are a testament to grief and the disenchantment of Modernity in an era of ecological crisis. The transgressive identification with despair, desolation, and death provides a paradoxically generative refuge for outsiders. Rendered in bronze, her works stand as talismans and reminders of our deteriorating relationship with the earth.

Rose Eken, Rose, 2024. Patinated bronze

Courtesy of the artist, V1 Gallery and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Joacim Züger, Barsk Projects

I’m Not One, 2024

For CHART in Tivoli 2024 Julie Falk presents a series of body-sized, rosy-skinned marble slabs that are balancing, tall, and thin. The sculptures are perforated as if after a biopsy, pointing at how we as bodies ultimately always share matter, as the title says “I’m Not One”.

During CHART weekend, "I’m Not One" creates a straight line from Tivoli Gardens to the main venue of CHART Art Fair at Charlottenborg. Here, the rosy-skinned marble slabs, hanging from the ceiling of Sharp Project's gallery booth, form a series of perforated stone bodies in dialogue across the city center of Copenhagen.

In her first large-scale solo exhibition, Antiform, Falk took discarded bodies as a point of departure—from bronze casts of hair cut from hospital-prescribed wigs to enlargements of cardboard tubes from used fireworks, giant phallic figures that seem over-run, deformed, and embrittled, resting on the floor in the exhibition’s front space. Falk points to the bodily displacement of the artist herself, working away from the studio, as an inverse or anti-position, operating at odds, and meanwhile collecting scrap materials—forms that are discarded, abject, or thrown from use or even from art: Antiforms.

With a nod to the 1960s situationist movement, Falk turns around existing systems or architecture. The arrested pace of the hospitalized body—in bed as if “incarcerated” and working from confinement—is the baseline of Julie Falk’s (DK, 1991) recent sculptural and filmic works.

Photo: Julie Falk, I’m Not One, 2024. Sculptures of Marble placed on steel plinths

Courtesy of the artist, Sharp Projects and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

Real Life Tetris, 2024

For CHART in Tivoli 2024, Michael Johansson has created two new site-specific installations that continue his ongoing sculptural series Real Life Tetris. Johansson’s sculptures transform everyday objects and spaces into places for artistic intervention. His works subtly comment on our experience of place, space and our relationship to objects.

Johansson deals with ordinary objects we all recognize but in a way far from the ordinary. When objects are morphed into precisely stacked shapes and connected to a certain place, they are transformed into catalysts of new meanings.

Photo: Michael Johansson, Real Life Tetris, 2024. Installation of everyday objects

Courtesy of the artist, Helsinki Contemporary and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Harvest, 2024

For the 2024 CHART in Tivoli exhibition, Wilson Saplana Gallery presents the site-specific sculpture Harvest (2024) by Danish artist Jens Settergren. In Denmark, the straw of wheat has a clear symbolic value as it, to most people, is instantly recognisable as an indicator of summer. When it sways in the wind, sweeping across the landscape, it evokes feelings of serenity and nourishment. It is placed on the banks of the Tivoli Lake, flanked by the mill and the St. Georg III Frigate, among the colourful flowers as an addition to the towering amusements. But its presence enhances more than the charming idealisation of Denmark present in the park.

This over-dimensioned wheat straw is rendered in steel; it is rigid, and the stem is stripped of leaves and joints. Unnerving but equally seductive and enchanting - with its metallic lacquered colours that reflect the light and change as you move around the sculpture - it is presented as a piece of constructed nature as if it’s been domesticated and cultivated into something grotesque, an omen of farming technologies and of an understanding of nature as but a resource to be controlled. Its fantasy reveals the reality of present and, most likely, future industrialised agriculture, and the imaginaries that this future evokes.

Photo: Jens Settergren, Harvest, 2024. Sculpture in steel lacquered in chameleon autopaint

Courtesy of the artist, Wilson Saplana Gallery and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

Dawn of Flames II, 2023

Found objects with questionable taste constitute a cornerstone in Anselm Reyle's oeuvre. This is exemplified by the series of ceramics that the artist developed a few years ago, in which he engages with the much-maligned style of Fat Lava, which emerged around the 1970s but soon ended up in flea markets as kitsch. The term „Fat Lava“ refers back to a particular form of glazing and is reminiscent of the large pores found in solidified lava flows. These days, however, Fat Lava is now generally associated with West German ceramics from the 1950s to the 1970s, which are characterised by bold colours, striking glazes, and experimental combinations using a great variety of forms. After the war, these pieces were, for the most part, industrially produced. Despite their simplified form, streamlined for industrial production, the vases stood out from other ceramics due to extensive research on new glazing techniques and bold colours, which were applied by hand. In addition to the primarily matte dark Fat Lava glazing, orange-red, cadmium yellow, and cobalt blue are among the colours representative of this style. Contrary to their former semi-industrial origins and short production time, the vases for Reyle’s series are created in collaboration with a traditional ceramic factory, due to their size and, in some cases, highly sophisticated processes.

„Dawn of Flames II" (2023) is part of a recently created series of ceramics now adorned with shiny metallic glazes. These works fit seamlessly into Reyle's artistic oeuvre, reflecting his fondness for glossy surface textures. At the same time, the relationship between high art and kitsch is called into question - a recurrent theme in Reyle's artistic practice. The vase displays cracks and irregularities – imperfections that the artist intentionally orchestrates by manipulating the clay before firing. Inspired by Japanese ceramics and their philosophy, Reyle adopts their appreciation of flaws and demonstrates his deliberately light-hearted approach to breaking away from perfection and linearity.

Photo: Anselm Reyle, Dawn of Flames II, 2023. Glazed ceramics, plinth stainless steel

Courtesy of the artist, Andersen’s and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Joakim Züger, Barsk Projects

J.P. Jacobsen, 2012

For CHART in Tivoli 2024 Bo Bjerggaard presents Per Kirkeby's monument to J.P. Jacobsen (1847-1885) in bronze, a significant tribute that encapsulates the artist's classic vocabulary. The sculpture appears with an upright tree on the front, bisected by a slit in the middle, which reflects the geological forms that often appear in Kirkeby's works, inspired by his numerous expeditions to Greenland. Kirkeby's vocabulary often includes meltwater cones; in the sculpture, this is clearly seen as a fan-shaped structure at the base.

On the back of the sculpture, stones are found placed at the base of the tree. When viewing the sculpture from this angle, another characteristic feature of Kirkeby's artistic language is revealed: the beam. At the top of the sculpture, there is an indication of a horizontal beam, while a vertical beam is also integrated into the design. These elements of beams, stones, and meltwater cones are recognizable motifs that frequently appear in Kirkeby's paintings.

Photo: Per Kirkeby, J.P. Jacobsen, 2012. Scultpure in Bronze

Courtesy of the artist, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

I found myself within a forest dark, 2024

At first glance, the round park bench appears frail. At the center, the stump of the tree that it once enclosed remains, its serpentine roots holding together the brittle wood. The bench, however, is anything but fragile. It has been cast in bronze and consists of more than 500 individually cast pieces.

The work “I found myself within a forest dark” (2024) is the most recent work by Danish sculptor Maria Rubinke, and the bench, much like the artist’s previous work, revolves around existential questions and the artist’s ongoing exploration of darkness. However, a glimmer of hope is present, as the roots suggest life underneath the surface.

Photo: Maria Rubinke, I found myself within a forest dark, 2024. Patinated bronze

Courtesy of the artist, Martin Asbæk Gallery and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Retainer Bodies, 2024

The work series 'Retainer Bodies' by Laura Guiseppi depicts enlarged dental retainers. Retainers are used to correct the mouth and teeth alignment. The sculptures play on the many associations that a dental retainer can evoke. It is both embarrassing and smelly, but it also helps to give a uniform and beautiful set of teeth. At the same time, the retainer is quite literally a foreign object in the body and, in its enlarged form, resembles something from outer space—a piece of armor, a shield, an enormous flower, or perhaps a mutated giant butterfly. The shapes and colors are initially attractive but also repulsive when we see what it actually are. This duality is interesting because it says something about our relationship with nature and the body as a malleable entity.

In Tivoli, the duality in "Retainer Bodies" is intensified. In these magical surroundings, the transformation of the grotesque form into giant butterflies, flowers, or something else becomes believable and not bizarre, blending with the park's decorative and enchanting architecture.

Photo: Laura Guiseppi, Retainer Bodies, 2024

Courtesy of the artist, Lagune Ouest and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Tivoli Tree, 2024

For CHART in Tivoli 2024, Peter Frie presents one of his bronze sculptures “Tivoli Tree”. Peter Frie is best known for his paintings but has since 2009 worked in bronze sculpture. The inspiration comes from his own works where the trees have emerged into "three-dimensional paintings". His trees and landscapes are not tied to a specific place, they exist at once nowhere, and everywhere.

“The trees are recognisably a painter's sculptures, given they are shaped as much by light and shade as by the hand... they create their own surrounding world and scale. When we look at them, we can see the air vibrating around them." (Timo Valjakka, Under the Red Sky, 2016)

He works at the foundry Bangkok Studio, Prachin Buri, Bangkok, Thailand where the Swedish caster Ulf Ferreus acts as a link to the workers. Peter Frie is usually involved in the entire process, from model work on a 1:1 scale to the finished work leaving the foundry. Some sculptures are upwards of three to four meters high and weigh a few tons, while the smallest is only a few decimeters and weighs a couple of kilos. During 2023 and early 2024, Frie showed a group of Trees at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

Photo: Peter Frie, Tivoli Tree, 2024. Sculpture in bronze

Courtesy of the artist, Galleri Arnstedt and CHART in Tivoli 2024. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

I, The World, Things, Life, 2024.

For CHART in Tivoli 2024, Jacob Dahlgren presents an interactive installation, “I, The World, Things, Life” consisting of multiple dartboards and darts. The work removes the hand of the artist and instead functions more as a series of instructions. A wall in one of Tivoli’s many restaurants is covered by dartboards; the optical illusion begins. Darts are placed in boxes next to the installation, and the audience is invited to engage with the work. Scoring a bullseye should be easy with so many chances, but the more one tries to focus, the more the targets move. Darts are thrown until the boxes are empty. The darts are then returned to the boxes and the process continues.

Jacob Dahlgren’s work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex, and socially shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, and industrially manufactured; stand in their gestalt form as a proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territories that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, to be used or consumed uniquely by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. This is evident in Dahlgrens’s social practice – a series of performance events around the world involving local communities – as well as in the large-scale sculptural installations in the public space for which he is well known.

This relationship with everyday life is one of the pillars of Dahlgren’s practice. Dahlgren constantly seeks geometric and abstract patterns in the surrounding world and processes the mundane and quotidian into art. His own life is inseparable from his work in a tangible way, for his project Peinture Abstraite he has worn striped t-shirts for the last twenty years and plans to do so for the rest of his life, as a living and on-going exhibition, sometimes with external curators invited for a couple of weeks.

Photo: Jacob Dahlgren, I, The World, Things, Life, 2024. Interactive dartboard installation

Photo by ​​Anna Fernsten Nilén

CHART in Tivoli 2025 took place from 28 August to 21 September and presented 15 unique contemporary art installations across Tivoli Gardens.

Harry Anderson (SE); Jenny Brockmann (DE); Frederik Næblerød (DK); Bjørn Nørgaard (DK); Frederik Nystrup-Larsen (DK); Kirsten Ortwed(DK); Tal R (IL/DK) and Sif Itona Westerberg (DK)

Photo: Frederik Nystrup Larsen, Ivy Fence, 2025 installed as part of CHART in Tivoli 2025

Courtesy of the artist, V1 Gallery and CHART in Tivoli. Photo by Jan Søndergaard

Although on maternity leave during the preparation period, Anna Fernsten Nilén was responsible for securing the audio guide production, writing all artwork texts, and overseeing the installation and de-installation processes, as well as coordinating the press day and leading several guided tours during the exhibition period. Prior to taking leave, she curated and planned one of the installations, Seat #12 by German artist Jenny Brockmann, contributing to the conceptual and artistic direction of the 4th edition.

Seat #12, 2021

Aluminium, steel, artificial leather

For Berlin- and New York-based artist Jenny Brockmann, presenting Seat#12 in Tivoli Gardens is a deliberate nod to the history of the amusement park as a space where technology and human interaction are fused to create compelling experiences. This tradition often involved experimental installations that tested innovations destined for broader society—as seen in Coney Island’s Luna Park, where new technologies were tested before their urban deployment. Architect Rem Koolhaas reflects on this in Delirious New York, highlighting the surreal interplay of fantasy and function that shaped early modern urbanism.

Seat#12 continues in this lineage, inviting viewers into a physical, social experiment that is as much about form as it is about the fragile choreography of human cooperation.

Seat#12 is an interactive sculpture mounted on a single central axis, offering seating for twelve people in a layout reminiscent of a circular conference table. The structure touches the floor at only one point, meaning the twelve aluminium branches—each ending in a seat cushion—create a tipping motion as soon as someone tries to sit down.

With its swing-like mechanics, the work sets up an unusual situation: every movement, even the smallest, made by one sitter directly affects the position of all others. A person attempting to sit must be counterbalanced by another to stabilise the sculpture. Its equilibrium depends on the sitters’ collective interaction. As more people participate, the greater the need for coordination and mutual agreement on when and how to sit. That means that the more people who wish to sit down, the clearer the agreement needs to be on when and how each individual sits. The interrelatedness between participants, their communication, and willingness or unwillingness to re-position for a collective balance, becomes part of the installation.

The seemingly futuristic object deals with communication: A voiced, or perhaps merely sensed discourse on the perfect balance inevitably evolves between those seated.

Photo: Jenny Brockmann, Seat #12, 2021, installed as part of CHART in Tivoli 2025

Courtesy of the artist, Dorothée Nilsson Gallery and CHART in Tivoli