World's largest Hans Christian Andersen collection to be transformed by film director

Forget the cosy, romanticised notions surrounding this writer of famous fairy tales. Beneath the surface of stories such as The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling and The Snow Queen lies another Hans Christian Andersen: vulnerable, obsessive and torn between longing and pain. This is the Andersen that Nicolas Winding Refn now confronts as he delves into The Royal Danish Library’s Hans Christian Andersen collection, the largest in the world. He approaches him not as an interpreter, but as a 
kindred spirit.

Nicolas Winding Refn, the creator of Pusher, Drive and, most recently, Her Private Hell, has made the outsider’s perspective, the beauty of brutality and the darker reaches of the human psyche hallmarks of his artistic practice. Now he turns his gaze to a writer who has been dead for 150 years. And it turns out that the two have been telling the same story all along, each in his own language.

The Superstar Syndrome is not a conventional exhibition. It asks something of its visitors: that they surrender to it and allow themselves to be absorbed. Room by room, Nicolas Winding Refn, in collaboration with The Royal Danish Library, has created a series of immersive installations in which original Hans Christian Andersen manuscripts, letters and diaries from the library’s collection merge with Refn’s atmospheric visual universe.

"Cultural heritage is extraordinary because it can deepen our understanding of who we are as individuals and as a people. For many, Hans Christian Andersen’s writings are an intrinsic part of Danish culture. But even a small, happy country has its darker sides if you look closely enough. And there is something to be learnt from them. I am delighted that, together with Nicolas Winding Refn, we will be presenting a unique exhibition in 2027; one in which we can all come face to face with the darker sides of Andersen’s world – and perhaps even with the darkness within ourselves," says Bente Skovgaard Kristensen, Director of the Royal Danish Library.

The exhibition is conceived as both an encounter and a fusion. Andersen’s fairy tales and Winding Refn’s visual language inhabit the same ambiguous territory: beauty and pain, light and darkness, sensitivity and brutality. Room by room, their two bodies of work are woven ever more closely together until it becomes impossible to tell where the writer ends and the director begins. The result is an experience that speaks directly to the senses – and may reveal something of each visitor’s own darkness along the way.

"We will never know the true Hans Christian Andersen. And that is probably for the best. But his works will endure for ever, and I have come to realise that he and I are the same person," says Nicolas Winding Refn.