COPENHAGEN.- Founded for artists by artists in 1986, O—Overgaden is one of the few large-scale contemporary art institutions in Denmark with an unwavering focus on mounting solo exhibitions by emerging artists, local and international. This spring, O present solo shows by practitioners including visual artist Freja Sofie Kirk, sculptor ihsan saad ihsan tahir, painter Morten Knudsen, and artist collective coyote. Alongside commissioning new works, each exhibition is accompanied by a publication in O’s monographic series—with upcoming contributors including, among others, Elisa R. Linn, Mariam Elnozahy, and Kristian Vistrup Madsen—designed by fanfare and released in print and online for free download.
Freja Sofie Kirk
February 21–May 3, 2026
The unsettling, intertwined spin of desire-and-death in entertainment industry imagery is central to Freja Sofie Kirk’s (1990, Denmark) photographic practice. In a new video work created for O—Overgaden, the ancient war trick of falling from the saddle pretending to die is performed by a female trick rider, filmed close-up. The scene interlaces with images of workers in Hazmat suits, frozen mid-task while cleaning an amusement shooting range, as well as appropriated footage of U.S. Army soldiers jokingly posing in a so-called Mannequin Challenge, standing still mid-combat. Dizzyingly, the camera circulates around these immovable scenes—a dangling female body, frozen sanitation workers, and motionless troopers—taking us down a swirling abyss of suspended time; a time that, contrary to the images’ immediate seductive quality, carries a repetitive imprint of maintenance and the quieter, less spectacular drag of death.
ihsan saad ihsan tahir
February 21–May 3, 2026
Reflecting how Arab bodies have been continuously culturally appropriated and exploited, not unlike artworks or artifacts, ihsan saad ihsan tahir (1995, UK/Denmark) quotes ancient sculpting formats while reiterating these in contemporary industrial materials. A centerpiece at O—Overgaden is a styrofoam and jesmonite reconstruction of the colossal granite arm of Pharaoh Amenhotep III with clenched fist, expropriated to the British Museum. To this tahir adds a manus fica (a historic hand gesture where the thumb is pushed between index and middle finger), today employed as explicit insult in contemporary gang culture, making the arm seemingly revolt against the looting oppressors.
Morten Knudsen
May 23–August 22, 2026
The tides of loss and its onerous repetition—daily, weekly, annually—flow through Morten Knudsen’s (1985, Denmark) painterly practice. Thick impasto surfaces, deep-hued colors, and a hint of fin de siècle. At first sight his flowery landscape paintings could be seen as romantic, nostalgic, yet they also reveal themselves as a surging virus: dirty, gnarly, uncontainable, and invasive. Knudsen typically leaves an area of the canvas sparsely occupied. The painterly composition and its void spaces become a motif in themselves, evoking his son’s short life and the aftermath—the paralysis and exhaustion of grief; a condition Knudsen reworks perennially in his ongoing series of spirals, ritually reiterating the coiling symbol.
coyote
May 23–August 22, 2026
coyote is an artist collective established in 2017, which examines how working together can instigate alternative spaces and stories that engage with collectivity. In other words: how a group, in and of itself, becomes a material. In their first large-scale solo exhibition, coyote reflects on how communities today—often sparked by collective memory or popular media—reshape everyday city life, using specific geographic sites as scenographic settings, bleeding together fiction and reality.
Team: Rhea Dall (Director & Chief Curator), Vera Østrup (Curator & Project Coordinator), Clara Linn Collins-Andersen (Press Coordinator, Maternity Leave Cover), Toke Martins (Installation Manager), Nanna Friis (Managing Editor), Anne Kølbæk Iversen (Postdoc Researcher).
