Resonance of Opposites

Journey of Reflection

Exhibitions

This journey is an invitation into the inner world of the designer. Here, visitors experience the cultural frame of Opposites United, how concepts are produced and refined, and its fundamental profiles: Culture Vanguard, Creative Risk-takers, Relentless Innovators. Each artwork is shaped by these three culture characteristics. Attitudes that are not confined to a single message, but unfold across multiple layers of meaning and interpretations, extending the designer’s gaze and underlying mindset into the visitor’s own experience. Here, design is not explained. It is discovered through the act of gazing, daring, and musing: three perspectives that hasten new connections and possibilities, inviting visitors to encounter the essence of Kia’s design philosophy.

Tap the rooms to explore the exhibition

Culture Vanguard
Outer Perspective(Gaze)

This artwork represents the designer’s gaze. While the central light symbolizes creative energy, the surrounding elements act as the cultural objects of inquiry: meanings, concepts and perspectives. As these elements reflect, block, and refract the light, each uncovers its own characteristics and inner qualities, revealing their spectrum of interpretation and thus forming new unexpected relationships among diverse cultural backgrounds and within the whole process of creation. Here, “to gaze” is not merely to observe, but to read the world and capture inspiration, to produce new possibilities. This work embodies the attitude of Culture Vanguard: a gaze that senses and grasps emerging culture, discovering wonders and novelties within it.

Talks
This year again, the talks programme takes shape around Opposites United, Kia’s design philosophy drawing meaning from encounters between contrasts, where tension becomes a generative force, and transformation is always in motion. Rather than seeking resolution, it embraces the fluid interplay of differences as a space for imagination and change. The programme unfolds through three pillars: Culture Vanguards, those who move beyond established codes to envision subversive cultural landscapes; Creative Risk-Takers, who embrace uncertainty as a catalyst, turning risk into a source of invention; and Relentless Innovators, who persistently expand the limits of possibility, weaving connections across disciplines to articulate new visions of the present and what lies ahead.
Tuesday 21stRSVP
19:00Designing with the Everyday as a Poetical and Critical Act
  • Marco Sammicheli
  • Humberto Campana
  • Charlotte Malterre-Barthes
A root, a rope, a branch, a plush toy: taking inspiration from - and physically employing - the everyday across interior design, architecture, and urban planning carries both a poetic stance and a critical, ecological subtext. What is at stake in the production of space in urban and rural marginal contexts shaped by profound human and environmental change? And what is the role of landscape design through the lens of the everyday? These are the questions that will guide designer Humberto Campana, celebrated for his interior and landscape creations that employ vernacular materials, and architect and urban designer Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, who is at the forefront of the discourse on the political economy of space production, with curator and Triennale Milan director Marco Sammicheli moderating the conversation.
Wednesday 22ndRSVP
19:00Material Culture and Agency
  • Caroline Issa
  • Otto Von Busch
  • Marco Rambaldi
Contemporary material culture is testing the potential of fashion design-ranging from DIY practices to its most institutionalised forms-to serve as both a thermometer and a catalyst for social change. In an industry negotiating between entrenched institutional frameworks and the growing call for social justice shaping today’s cultural discourse, design historian Otto von Busch and fashion designer Marco Rambaldi, moderated by TANK Magazine CEO and fashion director Caroline Issa, will interrogate how acts of creation can open up opportunities for agency, autonomy, and resistance, as well as the potential of fashion design to empower communities beyond theory.
Thursday 23rdRSVP
19:00Method as a Living System
  • Andrea Lissoni
  • Giulia Bini
  • Alexandra Pirici
Whether embodied in choreographic works by performance artist Alexandra Pirici, or in the practices of scientists and artists at CERN operating within invisible, ever-shifting environments - here represented by curator Giulia Bini - what is at stake when creative methods are applied to living systems? Extending into fields such as mobility design, the question becomes how method enables modes of observing, interacting, and producing, while also interrogating how creativity is shaped in the process to generate relevant, impactful, and innovative outcomes. The conversation will be moderated by art historian and Haus der Kunst director Andrea Lissoni.
Friday 24thRSVP
19:00Land, Community and Ecology
  • Rachaporn Choochuey
  • Ana María Durán Calisto
  • Cecilia Vicuña
Across ecosystems, land, and the human communities that inhabit them, runs a fil rouge that binds the three together in a relationship of mutual vulnerability, the balance of which grows ever more fragile. Architect and design director of all(zone) Rachaporn Choochuey, joined by artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, and designer, urban planner, and co-founder of Estudio A0 Ana María Durán Calisto, will discuss what it means to respond to this understanding through coexistence and collaboration with the land, developing regenerative approaches that engage its environmental and material cycles while drawing on local and vernacular forms of knowledge, including precolonial epistemes.
Saturday 25thRSVP
18:00Realism and Portraiture of Memory
  • Fabio D'Innocenzo
  • Damiano D'Innocenzo
  • Jim Goldberg
  • Joanna Hogg
A story of people can be told through the haze of social realism, where characters are often blurred into their generational and class-dictated behaviours, or through a heightened, almost fable-like register, laden with intensified emotional and stylistic codes. Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg, alongside filmmakers Joanna Hogg and Fabio and Damiano d’Innocenzo - each with their distinct artistic identity - will delve into what is needed today for effective storytelling in cultural, visual, and cinematographic production: one that, after sustained contemplation, may draw the observer into that fleeting sense of familiarity with the subject that is the magic of storytelling.
19:00Symposium
  • Marco Sammicheli
  • Caroline Issa
  • Andrea Lissoni
  • Rachaporn Choochuey
  • Fabio D'Innocenzo
  • Damiano D'Innocenzo
What happens when opposing forces are held in balance? The festival concludes with a final symposium that gathers its moderators for a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary exchange on this central question. Throughout the programme, each session has examined moments of tension—points where ideas meet, unsettle one another, and evolve. Led by Marco Sammicheli, the closing conversation draws these threads together, exploring how friction can energise thinking and creative practice in a world where clear-cut categories are increasingly unstable. Bringing together leading voices from fields ranging from the visual arts, architecture, interior design, filmmaking, urban planning, and fashion, the symposium opens a moment for reflection in which varied and distinct viewpoints intersect and give rise to new ways of seeing.
Music
Artist Promo

Isabella Lovestory

Artist Promo

kiss facility

Artist Promo

WaqWaq Kingdom

Artist Promo

Aunty Rayzor

Artist Promo

HiTech

Artist Promo

OLI XL ft. Valeria Litvakov

Artist Promo

Rachika Nayar

Program

Journey of ReflectionKia Design Exhibition of Experience

April 20th - 26th
10:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Free Entry
Last Admission at 6:30 PM
Tuesday 21stRSVP
19:00Designing with the Everyday as a Poetical and Critical ActTalk
21:00Isabella LovestoryLive
Wednesday 22ndRSVP
19:00Material Culture and AgencyTalk
21:00kiss facilityLive
Thursday 23rdRSVP
19:00Method as a Living SystemTalk
21:00WaqWaq KingdomLive
22:00Aunty RayzorLive
23:00HiTechLive
Friday 24thRSVP
19:00Land, Community and EcologyTalk
21:00OLI XL ft. Valeria LitvakovLive
Saturday 25thRSVP
18:00Realism and Portraiture of MemoryTalk
19:00SymposiumTalk
21:00Rachika NayarLive