Experience runestones, stand face to face with bog bodies, see The Golden Horns, be inspired by the suit worn by the first Dane in space and see an original hash stall from Freetown Christiania. The National Museum tells the history of Denmark from the earliest settlements to the life today.  Iconic treasures of Danish history Experience world-famous highlights with a starring role in Danish history. Runestones, The Golden Horns, the suit worn by the first Dane in space and the hash stall from Freetown Christiania that has become a symbol of Danish liberal-mindedness. 'THE VIKING SORCERESS' Meet the powerful sorceress of the Viking Age at the National Museum’s spectacular exhibition. Step inside the mystical universe of the Vikings and unravel their complex relationship to their own age and the future. The Children’s Museum Here you are invited to play and touch everything in sight! Join a raid in the Viking ship, discover a backyard of the 1930s or enter a classroom of the past and experience what school was like for the great-grandparents of Danes. Board the cargo ship and settle down in the berth in the cabin, or explore a Pakistani market and buy food in the bazaar. You can also cook in a Medieval kitchen, or prepare the knights’ castle for defense against enemy attacks. Special exhibition: The roots of Christmas, 15/11/24-5/1/25 (Ritzau.dk) The exhibition The Roots of Christmas is a total experience taking you into different Christmas universes. In the first you find yourself in a gigantic Advent calendar where the windows of the National Museum have been transformed into 24 calendar doors. Behind the doors are old Christmas decorations that reveal surprising stories about Christmas past. In the next universe you arrive at a dark Danish farmyard on the night of Christmas. You are actually not meant to be out here, because the dark forces of nature are even more powerful at Christmas. Next stop is a forest a thousand years ago, where Vikings have just killed a pig as an offering to the gods. As you go through the exhibition you discover that Christmas is an age-old ritual full of surprises. The traditional Danish tale Peter’s Christmas has been a source of Christmas nostalgia since the 1800s, but Christmas has much deeper roots in Christianity and the pagan winter celebration Jól. Christmas was once a seasonal ritual connecting people, nature and the gods. It marked the transition to a new year and brought prosperity and fertility. Eat Nordic With clear references to classic lunch and local dishes, restaurant Smör serves new interpretations of Danish food. NB: The Museum is closed on the 24th, 25th and 31st of December. However, you are more than welcome to visit between 10-17 on the 1st of January.

Step into the beautiful mineral halls, touch a huge meteorite from outer space and explore the natural world in the changing exhibitions. An annual highlight at the museum is the famous exhibition Wildlife Photographer of the Year, featuring the 100 best nature and wildlife photos worldwide. Experience the beauty and fragility of nature in an exhibition that delights millions of people every year. See more about the exhibition at wpy.dk.     Recharge in the café with a view of the Botanical Garden, where you can explore the museum's collection of rare plants and see the iconic Palm House.

HOW TO BECOME A COPENHAGENER Copenhagen is one of the world’s most livable cities. But who are the Copenhageners and what kind of city is Copenhagen? Begin your visit in Copenhagen at the Museum of Copenhagen, located in a beautiful, historical building right behind City Hall. You’ll be introduced to all the most important places and events in the history of the Danish capital. From the city of the Viking Age, through the building boom and plague, fires and bombings, to the free city of Christiania today. A vast array of unique, original exhibits bring the city and its people to life. Our interactive model gives you an overview of the entire city – perhaps you will end up as a Copenhagener yourself! THREE HIGHLIGHTS See the 600 years old shipwreck of a keel Examine an early edition of today’s Copenhageners’ favourite means of transport – the bicycle! Get an overview of the city on the Copenhagen Panorama with our large scale, interactive model. In a hurry? Se the highlights of the museum in just 30 minutes. CAFÉ & SHOP Find an original gift in our museum shop, which offers everything from postcards to handcrafted design or relax in the café or in the ‘hyggelige’ courtyard. Special Exhibition: The Local Business – Photos from Wong’s Takeaway to RC Dry Cleaners, 01 May. - 20 Oct. 2024 Copenhagen’s small businesses are often declared in danger of extinction as they battle to survive competition from chain stores and shopping centres. Photographer Ulf Svane and historian Mathias Kobberrød Rasmussen take us to the Copenhagen dog salon, jewellers, dry cleaners and other enterprises in the Danish capital to give us a snapshot of the businesses and their proprietors. Join us on a tour of a colourful world of charismatic retailers and a hotchpotch of style and local spirit far removed from the city’s department stores. The exhibition opens to the public on 1 May at the Museum of Copenhagen just behind Copenhagen City Hall (cphmuseum.kk.dk)

A must-see museum for all who is curious about the human body, disease, and health.  Medical Museion is not for delicate souls – diseases and their treatment have always been dramatic. But if you dare to face how the human body has been understood and treated over time - from antiquity to the age of the gene - this is the place for you.  Explore the beautiful exhibitions in the historic Royal Academy for Surgeons from 1787. Medical Museion has one of the biggest and richest historical collections of medical artefacts  in Europe. The collections contain 150,000 — 250,000 artefacts, depending on what counts as a individual artefact. We also have a large image collection, a document archive, and a historical book collection.   Exhibithions: Special Exhibition, Margarine: 22 March – 22 December 2024 The exhibition illustrates how the choices we make about our diet, our understanding of how blood vessels function, and the statistics of human health have been intertwined in Danish and international history. Below the pearly, dull surface of margarine lurks compelling stories of war, globalization, deceased whales, angry butter farmers, trans-fatty acids, processed foods, and lives saved The exhibition consists of two rooms. In one room you can experience a mixture of collected historical objects, film clips, sound and objects from Medical Museion’s own collections. In the exhibition’s second room, there is an interactive installation where the audience can shape the soft margarine with the movements of their own bodies. Mind the gut: Our brain and bowels are under examination in the exhibition Mind the Gut. Through a thought-provoking blend of science, art and history, the exhibition explores the complex connections between our mind and our guts. Brain, gut feelings, identity, bowels, bacteria, microbiomes – all interlinked. Mind the Gut shows, how doctors researchers, patients and artists have tried to understand and treat the complex relation between mind and gut throughout time. An enigma, which have occupied us through millennia and still does through scientific experiments, trendy lifestyle tendencies and fierce debates about health. The body collected: The human body has been collected for medical research and teaching during the last few centuries, and body parts have been prepared, preserved and conserved. The exhibition ‘The Body Collected’ presents for the first time a large selection of historical collections of human remains from the 18th century to now. The oldest specimens come from research collections of fetuses, skeletons, bones, organs, and histological samples. The latest arrival are biopsies, cells, and DNA, as preserved in biobank freezers. The collections have switched focus as our understanding of health and disease are improved, and as a consequence of technological advances.

Kunsthal Charlottenborg is one of the largest and most beautiful exhibition spaces for contemporary art in Northern Europe The exhibition space presents an ambitious program with international outlook featuring talents as well as established stars from both Denmark and abroad. Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents uncompromising and agenda setting art still understandable for everyone. The trendsetting exhibition program is supplemented with a large number of activities like artist talks, performances, concerts and film screenings. Ever since Kunsthal Charlottenborg opened in 1883, the venue has hosted exhibitions featuring many of the leading contemporary artists of the given times, accommodating many different types of shows and activities. Charlottenborg now celebrates its long history with a large-scale exhibition featuring all-new and older works alike. Together, they will evoke and add nuance to the history of Kunsthal Charlottenborg, a venue without a collection or a historical archive. Embracing chaos, affinities and time glitches, the exhibition Full of Days forges intuitive connections between historical moments and less-remembered shows, stories and events. Through a cacophony of voices, contemporary and historical artists are framed into a reflection on the elusiveness of time and the multiplicity of its representations, offering a non-linear account of one the Kunsthal’s possible histories. Special Exhibithions (Kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk):   Poetics of Encryption, 28 sep – 12 jan 2025 Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents this year’s major group exhibition in close collaboration with KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Poetics of Encryption explores the dark side of tech, bringing together 38 international artists. Installed in Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s grand south wing, the exhibition spans analogue and digital media featuring historic and newly commissioned works. Though we rely on digital tools for many things, we rarely understand how they work. Moreover, due to the proprietary nature of much corporate tech, even the most curious among us cannot gain deeper insight. Today, we are forced to come to terms with our relative lack of power in the face of inscrutable systems. What symptoms of this personal and political drama register in the cultural field? What moods, symbols, or narrative frames capture the aesthetics and politics of exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, and speculation concerning technology’s inside? The exhibition is curated by Nadim Samman, the author of the recent book titled Poetics of Encryption. Art and the Technocene. It surveys an imaginative landscape marked by ‘Black Sites’, ‘Black Boxes’, and ‘Black Holes’ — terms that indicate how technical systems capture users, how they work in stealth, and how they distort cultural space-time. These three themes form the basis for the exhibition Poetics of Encryption that play out across more than 1000 m2 in Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s south wing. Francis Upritchard, 28 sep – 16 feb 2025 Experience Francis Upritchard (b. 1976, based in London) unfold a world of mermaids, mythical creatures and eccentric figures in her first Scandinavian exhibition. Presenting more than 100 works, this comprehensive exhibition creates a space somewhere between ideas of our past and visions for a future. Upritchard works in a field where visual art and craft intersect. Her art takes on many different formats, ranging from large-scale figurative sculptures to ceramics, blown glass vases, jewellery and diminutive beings. Her references include ancient art, Asian folklore, 20th century European sculpture and science fiction literature as she investigates how the past is perceived today and what the future might look like. Among the exhibited works are sculptures embodying mythical and fantastic figures such as the centaur, the dinosaur and the mermaid, made in bronze as well as balata, a natural rubber from Brazil. At Kunsthal Charlottenborg, these beings will be accompanied by a large collection of the artist’s miniature sculptures and a group of eccentric figures dressed in colourful clothes. As an ensemble Upritchard’s works escape established norms and create a kaleidoscopic narrative, which offers the opportunity to contemplate different facets of the human condition. Charlottenborg Art Books The independent bookstore offers a distinctive selection of books and magazines, including publications in the fields of fine art, critical design, typography, literature, and theory.Apollo Bar & Canteen Apollo Bar & Canteen are Kunsthal Charlottenborg’s bar and dining place by chef and creator Frederik Bille Brahe. Every weekday from Tuesday to Friday, you can enjoy a healthy and delicious lunch at the canteen, and all week you can enjoy breakfast, lunch or an exciting dinner or just a cup of coffee, a glass of wine or a drink at the bar next to the courtyard.