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 Louisiana Contemporary: Yael Bartana
28 February – 20 May 2012
With modern Jewish and European history as its background, the work of Israeli artist Yael Bartana is a visual art cavalcade and splicing-together of ideological currents and popular movements to which the 20th century stands as an often-tragic monument, created on a razor edge between fiction and reality.
Yael Bartana (b. 1970 in Kfar-Yehezkel, Israel) represented the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011 with the work And Europe Will Be Stunned. She is an artist who digs deep at the point where she stands. Louisiana’s exhibition presents three of her films from 2007-2011. The works follows the genesis and triumphs of the art project "The Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland" – a unique mixture of religious, political and nationalist endeavours played out between Israel and Poland – right up to the state funeral after the assassination of the leader of the movement.
The pain, frustration and hope in Bartana’s films and photographs evoke a presence and a response that extend beyond immediate recognition – dealing of course with the situation of the Jews in the artist’s own Israel, but also extending into wider history here and now.
 PINK CAVIAR
New works in the Collection 09-11
24. May - 19. August 2012
It is unfortunately not a matter of course that Danish or even foreign museums can expand their collections with works by young or classic artists. This takes funding that is available to few museums, and Louisiana too has to raise money every time something catches our eye that we think is important to the museum’s overall artistic statement. On the other hand there are many foundations and private individuals who think the museum’s extraordinary collection merits continued expansion, and this year’s almost sensationally rich presentation demonstrates this. There are works in all genres – video, photography, installation, sculpture and painting – from major works by Asger Jorn and Poul Gernes, Roni Horn, Erwin Wurm and Thomas Struth, to a wealth of contemporary art; from Thomas Demand and Tillmans to the youngest artists. Pink Caviar is a rich, diverse exhibition that is both on the ball and allows for the classics of tomorrow.
 The Nordic – Authentic Architecture
29. June - 21. October 2012
The Louisiana Museum has become famous for its architecture exhibitions for several reasons. In the first place because they always take a contemporary view of the material – they are about our world now! And secondly because they reject professional narrow-mindedness and cross artistic statements with architectural realities. Thirdly, they make the ultimate use of the location and space of the museum. You are never far from an architecture exhibition at the Louisiana, you are always in the middle if it. The exhibition in 2012 is about a concept or phenomenon that is arousing renewed global interest – the idea of the distinctively Nordic. Nordic stock is high at present, from politics and welfare to cuisine and design, and the year’s exhibition offers a take on what the Nordic actually is – and what such ideas mean for our societal and cultural development.
 Edward Kienholz: Five Car Stud
6. June - 21. October 2012
Five Car Stud is just one work – the artist is the American Edward Kienholz, and its story is fantastic. The work – a large installation about white racist attacks on black people in a frightening and dramatic Mississippi Burning set-up – aroused a huge sensation at the Documenta exhibition in Kassel in Germany, where it was shown in 1972. It was acquired by a Japanese museum and has been packed away ever since. Now it has been restored, and the Louisiana Museum, which has Kienholz in it collection, has organized an exhibition tour with the work, which is being shown right now at the huge Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will then travel to the Louisiana and on around Europe. is naked Americana, but today the evil it portrays must be seen as frighteningly global. At the same time the work is a natural supplement to the Louisiana’s collection and its many years of commitment to American art, including the recent Jacob Holdt exhibition.
Kienholz. From the installation of Five Car Stud, 1972.Photo: Renate Heyne / © Documenta Archive.
 Self-portraits
14. September 2012 - 13. January 2013
The self-portrait is a classic, well-tried but also intense and sometimes raw genre taking many different expressions all through art history. Louisiana’s big autumn exhibition will be showing both major works from the twentieth century – from van Gogh until the present and in all media – and will tell the story of the transformation of self-representations. Is it the artist’s true expression or identity we encounter in the self-portrait, or is it dream and fantasy, and can you at all paint yourself, see yourself, or is it only others who know who you are? The questions reach out beyond the artist’s own universe into the life of the viewer – and it is of course precisely from this that these pictures draw their fascination. The exhibition comprises over a hundred important works from the twentieth century, from Bonnard, de Chirico, Dalí and Kirchner to Mapplethorpe, Warhol, Basquiat, Krystufek and others.
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