Arts at CERN

Arts at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary join forces and announce the first open call for Collide Copenhagen

Today, we are pleased to announce a three-year partnership between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary through Collide, Arts at CERN’s flagship international residency programme.

Arts at CERN is designed to generate creative connections between science and the arts through a broad programme of artistic residencies, art commissions and exhibitions. Over the past decade, Arts at CERN has brought arts and science together in new configurations, in collaboration with leading cultural institutions around the globe. The Collide residency programme was established in 2012 to foster networks with international organisations, creating new links between art and fundamental science worldwide.

Copenhagen Contemporary is Copenhagen’s international art centre, displaying installation art created by world-renowned artists and new emerging talents. Located in the former B&W welding building and offering 7000 m2 of industrial halls, Copenhagen Contemporary displays large-scale installation art and creates collaborative partnerships and events across cultural genres, locally and internationally. Since 2016, Copenhagen Contemporary has hosted exhibitions featuring, among others, James Turrell, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Bruce Nauman, Yoko Ono, Anselm Kiefer, Wu Tsang, and Larissa Sansour.

“For over 10 years, the Collide programme has allowed us to forge bonds of a new kind with different cities across our Member States,” explains Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN’s Director for International Relations. “We are delighted to see this international network expand with Copenhagen, which has such important traditions in particle physics, technology development, innovation and artistic expression. Bringing these dimensions together in Copenhagen will enable us to take these vital, creative encounters across communities even further.”

“At Copenhagen Contemporary we are excited and proud to bring the prestigious Collide programme to Scandinavia and offer artists a unique opportunity to develop their work in dialogue with world-leading scientists and researchers. Art and science share a deep curiosity to understand the world and our place in it. But their methods and end goals are different. Through art, the great conversation about the human condition is constantly renewed. We want to make this programme an opportunity to investigate how technology affects our life and might change our destiny,” says Marie Laurberg, Director of Copenhagen Contemporary.

The first edition of Collide Copenhagen has now been officially launched. Artists from any country in the world are invited to submit their proposals for a fully-funded two-month residency, split between CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary. The selected artist or artistic collective will devote this period to artistic research and artistic exploration, working side-by-side with physicists, engineers, laboratory staff and the Arts at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary teams. For the first edition and the following annual calls, in 2024 and 2025, Arts at CERN and Copenhagen Contemporary will invite artists to reflect on the impact of science and research in contemporary culture. Proposals that consider the role of advanced technologies and novel scientific models as major topics in contemporary culture are welcome. Collide Copenhagen is especially aiming for artistic proposals that reflect on themes such as artificial intelligence, the modelling and analysis of vast datasets, the emergence of quantum technologies, and the interpretation of these themes from philosophical and ethical standpoints. The artists selected for the 2023–2025 editions will become part of an ambitious exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary in 2025, investigating technology’s impact on humanity.

The application deadline is 8 May 2023. An international jury of experts will review the proposals and the decision will be announced in late June 2023.