CPH:DOX’s Inter:Active returns to Kunsthal Charlottenborg with a theme called Hypervigilance

If you like art that buzzes with the nervous energy of our times, Copenhagen’s documentary festival has a room for you. The Inter:Active Exhibition at Kunsthal Charlottenborg presents immersive installations, VR, games and live-performances that refuse to sit quietly in the cinema seat. The program title this year is Hypervigilance, and yes, it aims straight for the sense of living under constant watch in a world full of screens, power grabs and widening inequality.

Curatorial approach and tone

Mark Atkin, the curator of Inter:Active and head of studies at the CPH:LAB talent program, built the show by seeing a lot of work, talking to artists and following submissions from incubator programs. He treats the exhibition more like an art show than a film festival, tracing what artists are worried about and drawing threads between them.

The result is a program that leans dark but keeps a pulse of resistance. Many pieces are rooted in the lived experience of marginalized communities, where constant alertness is ordinary. Others show how that mindset is spreading across society. Across the works you will find activism, sexual expression, and formal rebellion as responses to pressure and surveillance.

This is the 23rd edition of CPH:DOX, and the Inter:Active selection runs through Sunday.

Highlights from the Inter:Active program

  • Brains in the State of Suspension
    Kakia Konstantinaki
    A live-performed CGI short that stages disembodied brains wrestling with domination, control and horror. It asks what human intelligence becomes when it is cut loose from the body.
  • Coded Black
    Maisha Wester
    A social justice game that traces the persistent histories of systemic racism in the U.S. and the U.K. The piece blends primary documents, archival material and atmospheric storytelling across two scenes: one set on a plantation and one in a twentieth-century city. It aims to reveal both atrocity and Black resilience.
  • Dark Rooms
    Mads Damsbo and Laurits Flensted-Jensen
    A virtual series of intimate spaces where four protagonists navigate sexual awakening. The project invites audiences to move past shame and witness personal liberation in quiet, immersive scenes.
  • Inside: The Childhood of an Artist
    Sacha Wares
    A multisensory biography that places visitors inside the childhood home of artist Judith Scott. The experience reconstructs a pivotal moment from the 1950s and uses sound and sensory design to tell a story of love and separation.
  • My Tent Is Not a Shelter
    Mohamed Jabaly
    A fragile tent, stitched from the artist’s own clothes, serves as a memorial for Gaza. The installation pairs the cloth structure with video footage from life in Gaza over the past two years, emphasizing both resilience and vulnerability.
  • No Place at Home
    Sam Wolson and Lilli Carré
    A reported and illustrated piece about a mother and her trans teen who decide to leave the United States after new restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors. The project follows their emotional preparations and their move to Mexico.
  • The Sanctuary of Dreams
    Pierre-Christophe Gam
    A 44-minute immersive film and multi-sensory installation that acts as a collective future-dreaming ritual. The work blends speculative storytelling, animation, sound design and collage to imagine social and spiritual possibilities.
  • Celestis Obscura
    Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm
    An investigation of the link between historical gold rushes and the current commercial push into asteroid and lunar mining. The piece asks who benefits when private power reaches for cosmic resources.
  • In the Current of Being
    Cameron Kostopoulos
    A haptic VR experience that recounts the true story of Carolyn Mercer, who survived electroshock conversion therapy as a child. The work uses tactile feedback to convey trauma and survival.
  • Tales of a Nomadic City
    Med Lemine Rajel and Christian Vium
    A VR portrait of Nouakchott created with local youth, artists and scholars. The experience combines everyday scenes, rare archives and immersive sound to map the citys layered urban transformation.
  • The Pledge
    Daniela Nedovescu and Octavian Mot
    An interactive installation that makes AI bias visible. Participants face a camera while an algorithm reads their appearance and produces a personalized statement or pledge that reveals the machine’s assumptions.
  • The Lost Golden Lotus
    Chisato Minamimura
    A multisensory, Deaf-led performance that reexamines the history of foot-binding in China. The installation uses projected film, scent, taste and tactile soundscapes to connect a painful past with present-day beauty standards.
  • Burden of Other People’s Dreams: Chapter One - Ganymede
    Joe Bini
    A one-person-at-a-time live cinema work that mixes memoir, film and text. For 80 minutes visitors sit with an iPad, a screen and loudspeakers as a surreal, personal story about life as a film editor unfolds.

Why this matters

The Inter:Active show collects works that respond to the discomfort of our era. Artists turn anxiety into material, using immersion and participation to push audiences beyond passive viewing. The projects are often heavy, sometimes tender, and frequently designed to nudge you toward action or new understanding.

To really know what these pieces do, you should see them in person. That is kind of the point.