Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives transforms the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens into a stage for over 60 international artists grappling with one of the most urgent ethical questions of our time: how do we live with, and not over, animals? 

Running until January 7th, 2026, the museum-wide show spans five floors, combining visual art, science, philosophy, and activism to challenge speciesism and advocate for animal rights, sentience, and voice. ‘At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings.’ Katerina Gregos, curator of the exhibition and EMST’s creative director, explains, speaking with designboom. Inspired by John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay, Why Look at Animals? underscores the notion of ‘listening beyond language.’ It implicitly strives to ‘speak for those who have no voice,’ as the curator frames it, a driving force that shaped the entire process.

from left to right: Mark Dion, Men and Game, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Los Angeles | Rossella Biscotti, Clara, 2016. Courtesy of the artist | all installation view images by Paris Tavitian, unless stated otherwise

listening beyond language: art as a site for interspecies empathy

The curatorial framework by the art historian Katerina Gregos pierces through the anthropocentric lens that has rendered animals invisible, both culturally and ecologically. ‘I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently,’ she shares with designboom. Far from romanticising nature, the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life: industrial farming, vivisection, the exotic pet trade, hunting, and entertainment. Works on view make visible the brutal disconnections of modernity, where animals have been relegated from myth, companion, and co-inhabitant to product and spectacle. Berger’s claim that animals have ‘disappeared’ from daily life is literal here – their erasure becomes the focal point of critical reflection and creative resistance.

While rooted in ethics, Why Look at Animals? also delves into science, drawing on neuroethology and animal studies to dismantle outdated ideas like Descartes’ bête-machine, the animal as automaton. ‘I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere,’ Gregos tells us, adding that she ‘realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech.’ Visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives, intelligence, and social structures that may differ from human norms but are no less profound. Texts by thinkers like Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, and Tom Regan shape the theoretical spine of the exhibition, bringing together philosophical, legal, and environmental dimensions of animal advocacy. ‘This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront,’ insists Gregos. In a world where animals are often framed as voiceless, this show turns up the volume, demanding a reconfiguration of how we think and live. Dive into our in-depth discussion with Katerina Gregos below.

Nikos Tranos, Terrain (bridle for horses), 2024. courtesy of the artist and Zoumboulakis Galleries, Athens | Jonas Staal, Exo-Ecologies, 2023. Commissioned by Power Station of Art l 14th Shanghai Biennale Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai. Courtesy of the artist

INTERVIEW WITH KATERINA GREGOS

designboom (DB): How did John Berger’s 1980 essay shape your vision for this exhibition? Are there particular passages or ideas from the text that served as a curatorial compass? 

Katerina Gregos (KG): The title of the exhibition is drawn directly from John Berger’s seminal 1980 essay Why Look at Animals?, which was both a starting point and a conceptual anchor for the project. Berger’s reflections on the estrangement of humans from animals resonated deeply with me and informed my curatorial explorations. He begins his essay by highlighting the important role that animals played in human societies; ‘The animals first entered the human imagination as messengers and promises’ he writes, thus acknowledging the deep symbolic and spiritual role animals once played in human cultures. However, he goes on to point out a sea change in the relationship between humans and animals during modernity, highlighting the fact that ‘In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared.’ This is a reference not only to extinction or physical absence but to their cultural and symbolic disappearance from human life. ‘Everywhere animals disappear’ he emphasizes, ‘In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’ This is a striking statement on how animals have been marginalized and isolated in modern society, especially through artificial settings like zoos or circuses where they have been reduced to a spectacle or commodity – confined to manmade spaces, such as theme parks, factory farms, and, ultimately, to the abstraction of the supermarket shelf.

This systemic disconnection from the lives and deaths of animals mirrors a broader ethical and ecological rupture, one that the exhibition at EMST seeks to confront. Berger’s idea that animals have ‘lost their centrality’ in the human imagination helped shape the curatorial vision, which does not aim to romanticise animals or nature, but rather to challenge the mechanisms – economic, cultural, and visual – through which non-human lives have been rendered invisible, disposable, or instrumentalised. The book serves as the basis for the exhibition’s ethico-philosophical approach to non-human lives, and its plea for a consideration of animal rights. It is in this spirit that Why Look at Animals? becomes not only a question, but a provocation, one that urges viewers to reconsider how we see, relate to, and live with other species.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: What was the most challenging aspect of curating an exhibition that seeks to raise awareness and advocate for the moral and legal consideration of non-human life?

KG: One of the most challenging aspects was finding the right balance between raising awareness and fostering critical reflection – without falling into didacticism or moralising or the trappings of simplistic agit-prop art. Art is not activism in the traditional sense; its strength lies in its ability to open up space for nuanced thinking, emotional engagement, and deeper contemplation. But when dealing with such an urgent and ethically charged subject as the rights of non-human life, the line between aesthetics, advocacy, and information is a delicate one. Another challenge was how to sensitively represent the often invisible or marginalised suffering of animals, especially those not typically granted empathy – such as lab animals, factory-farmed creatures, or those displaced by environmental destruction. How do you visualise their realities without sensationalising or exploiting their pain? How do you speak for those who have no voice? These were questions I constantly grappled with. That is why there are no taxidermied animals in the exhibition, or scenes of graphic violence.

On a practical level, assembling a constellation of works that reflected a diversity of voices, geographies, and cultural understandings of human-animal relationships was vital. It was important to resist a Western-centric narrative and instead draw attention to plural worldviews – particularly Indigenous, postcolonial, or non-Western perspectives – that often hold a much more holistic understanding of interspecies coexistence. Ultimately, the challenge was to curate an exhibition that doesn’t offer easy answers, but rather provokes questions – about ethics, responsibility, and our place in the wider web of life. I hope that Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives can contribute to a broader shift in consciousness and policy, while also encouraging a personal reckoning about the assumptions we have.

front to back: Maarten Vanden Eynde Homo stupidus stupidus, 2008. Private collection, Slovenia | Nabil Boutros, Celebrities / Ovine Condition, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

DB: How does the exhibition address our uneven empathy toward animals, especially those typically overlooked or excluded?

KG: The exhibition aims to challenge the hierarchy of empathy that governs our relationships with non-human animals – where certain species are cherished, while others are ignored, commodified, or exploited without a second thought. At its core is the recognition that all forms of life are interconnected, and that our survival is deeply dependent on the well-being of the ecosystems and species with whom we share this planet. Despite having histories marked by colonialism, fascism, and struggles for independence – oppressions that should have sensitised us to injustice – we continue to uphold a deeply anthropocentric worldview. We presume human superiority over other species, often failing to acknowledge the moral and ecological consequences of that belief. This mindset not only leads to the suffering of non-human lives but positions us as one of the few species capable of destroying its own habitat.

Through Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives, I hope to provoke a deeper reflection on these contradictions, and encourage viewers to reconsider the ways in which empathy is selectively applied. By bringing to light the lives and perspectives of animals we rarely think about – from those used in testing or factory farming to those displaced by extractivist practices – the exhibition seeks to foster a more just and inclusive understanding of coexistence. Empathy must be extended beyond the familiar and the lovable, to include all those whose lives are intertwined with ours – often invisibly.

the museum-wide show advocates for animal rights, sentience, and voice | image © designboom

DB: With artists from over 30 countries, how did you make sure the exhibition reflects culturally diverse understandings of human-animal relationships rather than a Western-centric view?

KG: From its inception, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives was conceived not as a Western-centric exhibition about animals in art, but as a critical, ethical, and culturally expansive exploration of human-animal relationships across different regions, histories, and worldviews. One of EMST’s core commitments is to challenge the dominant narratives that often shape large-scale exhibitions, particularly those rooted in a Western canon. In line with the museum’s mission to explore ‘creative memory practices’ and resist presentism and amnesia, the curatorial approach deliberately sought out artists whose practices are embedded in culturally specific, historically layered, and often marginalised understandings of non-human life.

The exhibition features over 200 works by 60 artists from more than 30 countries across four continents, many of whom engage with non-Western cosmologies, Indigenous perspectives, and postcolonial critiques of human exceptionalism. This diversity was not incidental – it reflects the museum’s broader aim to foreground multiple, often contradictory, ways of understanding the world, particularly those shaped by colonial histories, forced industrialisation, ecological degradation, and ongoing systems of exploitation. Moreover, EMST’s position in Athens – as a city at the intersection of Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa – offers a unique vantage point from which to question binary worldviews. Greece itself has a hybrid identity shaped by Eastern, Levantine, and Western influences, and the museum draws on this complexity to amplify voices and narratives that sit outside of dominant curatorial models. In this sense, Why Look at Animals? is not only about animals, but also about how different cultures relate to the living world – how they remember, mythologise, commodify, mourn, or coexist with it. It is about making space for those understandings that have been excluded or undervalued, and about using contemporary art to surface new ethical relationships with more-than-human life.

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022 (installation view), Sound installation, Bird cages, speakers, 33’ (loop), Dimensions variable, Collection of EMST

DB: Do you see this exhibition as the beginning of a larger movement within contemporary art to address the rights of non-human beings? What role should artists and institutions play going forward?

KG: Yes, I believe this exhibition is part of a growing and necessary shift in contemporary art – one that seeks to dismantle anthropocentric worldviews and take seriously the rights, experiences, and agency of non-human beings. While this conversation has existed in philosophy, science, and activism for some time, contemporary art is now increasingly engaging with it in ways that are visceral, imaginative, and politically urgent. Art has a unique capacity to visualise the invisible, to make felt what is often ignored, and to propose new modes of thinking and relating. Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives contributes to a wider re-evaluation of how humans coexist with the more-than-human world – by foregrounding the ethical, emotional, and ecological dimensions of that relationship. The exhibition does not claim to provide definitive answers, but rather opens up a space for questioning, witnessing, and empathising – urging us to reconsider our own fraught and conflicted relationship with animals.

Going forward, artists and institutions alike have a responsibility to foster this kind of critical dialogue. For institutions, that means programming that reflects ecological urgency, supporting transdisciplinary approaches, and ensuring that diverse cultural perspectives on non-human life are represented – not just those rooted in Western scientific or philosophical frameworks. For artists, it means continuing to challenge dominant narratives, creating work that highlights urgent issues and how we understand them and using their practices to imagine more equitable multispecies futures. If there is a movement underway, it must also be an ethical one – grounded in care, accountability, and an openness to learn from other ways of being. The museum can – and must – be a place where such reorientations can begin.

visitors are prompted to engage with animals as complex beings with emotional lives | image © designboom

DB: In working on this project, did your personal relationship with animals or views on speciesism evolve in ways you didn’t expect?

KG: Curating Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives has been both a professional and deeply personal journey. I’ve long been concerned with questions of injustice and inequality, particularly within the human sphere. But I’ve also grown up with many different animals, living side by side with them, and realised early on that they are sentient, intelligent beings who are disadvantaged in our world because they do not possess speech. I’ve always felt the subject of animal rights and well–being to be an urgent one, and was puzzled how the so-called ‘art world’ did not consider it worthy of attention until very recently. Working closely on this exhibition, immersing myself in the vast and often disturbing realities of human-animal relationships, made me confront more viscerally the structural violence and moral blind spots that underpin speciesism.

What surprised me was not so much a change of heart – I have always felt that the way humans treat animals is profoundly problematic – but rather a sharpening of perspective, an expanded sense of urgency given the ecological crisis, in which animals are the invisible victims. The research forced me to confront the sheer scale and normalisation of cruelty towards non-human lives, often hidden in plain sight. I realised just how embedded this hierarchy is in our culture and how difficult it is to disentangle ourselves from it, even when we try. The exhibition also made me reflect more consciously on the idea of co-existence – not as an abstract ideal, but as a necessary ethical imperative. It’s no longer enough to think of animals as beings we must protect out of compassion. We must start acknowledging them as subjects with agency, presence, and rights, as lives that matter in and of themselves, not just in relation to us. This shift, I believe, is one that artists and cultural institutions must support. We have to help recalibrate the ethical lens through which we look at the world, to open up space for imagining new forms of kinship and solidarity across species.

Lynn Hershman Leeson The Infinity Engine, 2014 (detail) Multimedia installation, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist, Altman Siegel, San Francisco and Bridget Donahue, New York

DB: What kind of emotional or intellectual response do you hope to evoke in viewers?

KG: The exhibition confronts a range of exploitative and often invisible forms of violence against animals – whether through scientific testing, space exploration, genetic engineering, hunting, or habitat destruction driven by extractivist and industrial agricultural practices. At its core, Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives is an attempt to shift our gaze from a purely anthropocentric worldview to one that recognises the rights, agency, and suffering of non-human beings. I hope the show elicits both an emotional and intellectual response: empathy, reflection, discomfort, perhaps even outrage – but also a deeper understanding of the structural and ethical failures that underpin our relationship with the non-human world.

The goal is not to provoke guilt, but to awaken awareness and a sense of shared responsibility, and an impetus to change our habits (to meat, for example). By inviting viewers to confront the systemic ways in which human actions harm animal lives and degrade shared ecosystems, Why Look at Animals? aims to build a compelling case for reimagining how we cohabit the planet. The destruction we inflict on non-human life is ultimately a form of self-harm – an expression of greed, moral failure, and a profound inability to coexist with what is simply other than ourselves. If this project can spark meaningful dialogue, raise awareness beyond the art world, and contribute even incrementally to changing attitudes or policy, that would already be a powerful outcome.

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Taxonomic Trophies, 2005 – ongoing (detail)
Branches, wood and metal name tags
Dimensions variable 
Courtesy of the artist

Gustafsson & Haapoja Embrace Your Empathy, 2016/2025 (installation view) Installation, 20 Flags Dimensions variable Co-commissioned by EMSΤ Courtesy of the artists

Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal, Comrades in Extinction, 2020 – 2021 (installation view, detail), installation with wood, hardened oil landscape and gouache paintings. Dimensions variable, Production by EMST. Courtesy of Studio Jonas Staal

the show boldly confronts the systems that exploit animal life | image © designboom

Paris Petridis Lagia, 2001; Imathia, 2006; Thessaloniki, 2021; Galilee, 2011; Dead Sea, 2012. Courtesy of the artist

(from left to right): Marcus Coates, Extinct Animals, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London | Simona Denicolai & Ivo Provoost, hello, are we in the show?, 2012. Collection S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent | Anne Marie Maes, Glossa (bee tongue), 2024.

Marcus Coates Extinct Animals, 2018 (installation view, detail) Group of 19 casts, plaster Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Kate MacGarry, London| image © designboom

project info:

name: Why Look at Animals? A Case for the Rights of Non-Human Lives

curator: Katerina Gregos | @katerina.gregos

venue: EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art | @emstathens, Athens, Greece

exhibition design: Flux Office | @flux_office

dates: May 15th, 2025 – January 7th, 2026

The post ‘why look at animals?’ at EMST: katerina gregos on speaking for the voiceless appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

The Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in Paris transforms into a mesmerizing aquatic and musical landscape with the unveiling of clinamen, an immersive installation by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. On view until September 21st, 2025, and curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Pinault Collection, the large-scale project envelops visitors in a multisensory experience where porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement. At the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water. This vast, tranquil surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky visible through the museum’s iconic dome. White ceramic bowls drift across its surface, propelled by gentle currents, producing unpredictable melodic chimes as they serendipitously collide. 

While this is not the first iteration of clinamen – earlier versions have been staged at institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Centre Pompidou-Metz – it is the most ambitious to date. ‘This exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date,’ Céleste Boursier-Mougenot tells designboom. The museum’s architecture played a pivotal role. ‘My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work,’ the artist notes,‘I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ.’ Encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome, the Rotunda offers a rare resonance.‘The immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension,’ Boursier-Mougenot says.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, clinamen v.10, 2012-2025, courtesy of the artist, Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Galerie Xippas (Paris), Galerie Mario Mazzoli (Berlin) | photo by Nicolas Brasseur | all images courtesy of Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection, unless stated otherwise

embracing unpredictability within the clinamen installation

Like many of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works, the Bourse de Commerce installation exists at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. It also marks the culmination of decades of experimentation with sonic systems that operate independently of human control. A musician by origin, Boursier-Mougenot approaches sound as a ‘living material’ – as seen in clinamen, where the traditional constraints of music are shed, replaced by a self-regulating system that breathes and changes with each passing moment. ‘My systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms,’ the artist explains. 

The title clinamen comes from Epicurean physics and refers to the random, unpredictable motion of atoms. For Boursier-Mougenot, this idea mirrors the elemental operations at play in the installation. ‘The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation,’ the artist says. He sees the installation as ‘a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears.’ The inherent unpredictability is central to the experience: ‘if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.’

clinamen takes over the iconic Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce

enveloping visitors in a multisensory experience

Boursier-Mougenot deliberately embraces unpredictability in his creative process, a practice he discovered when allowing external sounds to enrich his compositions. This openness led him to ‘think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.’ This philosophy informs the entire structure of clinamen, which runs on a self-regulating system akin to a living organism. The materials, too, are deliberately fragile and mutable. Porcelain, water, sound. ‘It was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe […] that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago,’ he recalls. Clinamen beautifully embodies a tension between apparent opposites: order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. The artist’s previous work, harmonichaos, which involved vacuum cleaners playing harmonicas, explored similar themes of unpredictable, self-regulating systems. ‘With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another,’ he shares, highlighting the interplay of chance and inherent system logic.

In a world defined by acceleration and distraction, clinamen invites a radical slowing down. Visitors become part of the installation simply by being present. ‘With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence,’ he says. ‘The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.’ Ultimately, clinamen is not only a meditation on matter, motion, and sound, but a quietly profound call to attention. ‘I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world,’ Boursier-Mougenot admits, ‘but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.’ Read our conversation with the artist in full below, and watch clinamen in action here.

porcelain bowls, water, and invisible currents form a delicate choreography of sound and movement | photo by Florent Michel / 11H45

INTERVIEW WITH Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

designboom (DB): How did the architecture of the Rotunda in the Bourse de Commerce shape this version of the clinamen?

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (CBM): My approach is largely based on taking into account the places and spaces where I am invited to present my work. I see the architecture of each new exhibition venue as a matrix into which the technical and aesthetic principles of the installation are cast, as if into a mould, resulting in a new version in situ. In this way, many of the installation’s parameters can be redefined by the characteristics and particularities of the venue. At the Bourse de Commerce, the immense rotunda, encircled by Tadao Ando’s cement casket, under the high glass roof, offers clinamen the opportunity to fully express its planispheric dimension.

DB: The immersive installation has been shown before, but never at this scale. What new possibilities—or challenges—did this larger format bring?

CBM: You’re right, this exceptional version of clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce doubles the size of the basin of the largest installations built to date. At this stage, no one can say for sure whether everything will work as usual on this scale. It’s a challenge, with a multitude of technical issues to resolve in order to remain faithful to the work and its simplicity. To achieve this, I’m working with a team of excellent technicians, and it’s only at the time of the tests that we’ll know if everything is working. So it’s quite experimental, as I think any attempt at art should be.

at the heart of the Rotunda lies an expansive basin, eighteen meters in diameter, filled with water

DB: The title clinamen refers to the random motion of atoms in Epicurean physics. How does this idea connect to the movement and behavior of the installation?

CBM: Clinamen, this word and its definition came to me in the summer of 1997, as I was leafing through the pages of a dictionary. I was looking for a title for my new installation that would describe the principle of the work. I had the word declination in mind and was looking for a synonym here and there. The cosmic connotations of clinamen immediately captivated me and I found many analogies between the phenomenon it describes and my work in progress. So I adopted the title. Shortly afterwards, in view of the installation’s appearance, the title clinamen seemed a little pretentious, and for the work’s first exhibition I called it untitled. In the years that followed, untitled enjoyed great success in France and abroad in many different versions. Around 2003, production of the inflatable swimming pool model I had been using came to an abrupt halt. I had to design my installations with floating porcelain by having raised floors made into which one or more round pools could be integrated. Later, for exhibitions in vast spaces without walls, the raised floor took the form of a platform with access ramps and surrounded by circular benches, virtually acting as walls. As versions of the installation became larger and more planispheric, I decided in 2012 to rename the largest of them clinamen.

The analogy between my work entitled clinamen and the phenomenon of clinamen described by Lucretius in De rerum natura also concerned the notion of declination in the combinatorial sense and the question of exhausting the possibilities of encounter, occurrence and permutation. For materialists, the clinamen is the minimum angle that leads atoms, those inseparable and eternal particles, to collide and assemble to produce, by aggregation, all the perishable matter of our world, which constantly disintegrates and reformates : atoms are to matter what the letters of the alphabet are to language and writing, and it is from the variety of their combination that everything exists. In my work, there is also a curved movement that leads the cells represented by the porcelain bowls to collide, producing a world of sounds and potentially all the occurrences of the elements present. We can contemplate clinamen installation as a kind of model, a fairly schematic example, in which all these interactions take place before our eyes and for our ears. But if you try to trace the causal thread of a sequence, it’s impossible to do it live. In other words, if in the moment before two porcelain bowls collide you try to anticipate the resulting note or timbre, most of the time your expectation will be foiled by the sound of the collision.

unpredictable melodic chimes emerge as the bowls serendipitously collide

DB: The piece is guided by invisible currents, where ceramic bowls create sound through chance encounters. How do you work with unpredictability as part of your creative process?

CBM: I discovered the virtues of unpredictability for my music the day I accepted that outside sounds, totally unrelated to my own, such as those of the urban environment of the unspoilt place where I was producing my music, could mix with it and enrich it. Later, during a play by the company whose music I was composing, which was being staged on the roof of a campus building, the sounds of cars in the distance or the sound of the wind could be heard. The sounds of cars in the distance or voices, wind, planes passing in the sky and crows flying overhead mixed with my music for a noisy string quartet and reanimated it. It was all a question of sound levels and permanence of course, but it gave a “here and now” quality to my recorded and broadcast music. Later, I often used microphones to pick up sounds live outside theatres, reinjecting them and mixing them with my music. These experiences opened my ears and gradually led me to think about the production of music based on self-regulating systems. These systems generate musical forms over which I have no control over the order of inputs, but the result is very important to me.

ceramic bowls drift across the water surface, propelled by gentle currents

DB: Your choice of materials—porcelain bowls, water, currents—feels deliberately elemental. What draws you to these fragile, mutable mediums?

CBM: One day, Jack, a friend of mine who’s a piano maker, said to me: the piano is a collection of different materials – metal, wood, felt, glue, etc. – which can be dangerous to each other, and which are also subject to phenomenal mechanical tensions capable of destroying them. Fortunately, the ingenious arrangement of these materials results in an almost living object that only awaits the tension of the pianist’s nervous system to become the alter ego of the player.
For my part, it was while playing in my studio with everything needed to produce a catastrophe (inflatable pool, soft plastic, glass, porcelain, water, pump, electricity, heating element, etc.) that this work took shape, almost thirty years ago. In the field of art and installation, any object can be considered according to criteria that no longer have anything to do with its functionality.

as the bowls serendipitously collide they produce unpredictable melodic chimes | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: You’ve described sound as a ‘living material.’ How do you approach sound, not just as music, but as something sculptural, spatial, and physical ?

CBM: Rather, my systems of sound or musical production are modeled or inspired by living, self-regulating forms like organisms. As I relate with the harmonicaos work and the use of tuners immersed in a form of hesitation or doubt that I notice and exploit to thwart forms of off-putting repetition.

DB: There’s a tension in clinamen—between order and chaos, stillness and movement, silence and sound. How do you see these opposites coexisting in your work ?

It’s funny, towards the end of the nineties, I called an installation harmonichaos. It consists of thirteen silent vacuum cleaners, each of which plays a small diatonic harmonica, whose tonality, or tuning of the vacuumed notes, is different from the twelve other harmonicas. The operation and shutdown of each vacuum/harmonica module depends on a frequency analyzer built into the module. This is a chromatic tuner used by musicians to tune their instruments. It accurately identifies the sound frequency of a single note at a time, but its analysis becomes more than uncertain as soon as the device detects several notes or a chord simultaneously. The device reacts to surrounding sounds, hesitates, contradicts itself …
Observing this, I thought that a logic other than the one for which the device had been designed was at work, because the time division seemed “alive” to me. It was only a short step from there to imagining a specific form of life. I used the device because of its unreliability. With harmonichaos, it’s impossible to predict when each of the thirteen vacuum cleaners will work or stop, nor the duration of silences or chords played and held by one vacuum cleaner/harmonica module or another. Each module interacts with the twelve others in the ensemble ad libitum. What’s more, this low-tech system is disrupted by variations in the voltage of the electrical network feeding it, making any attempt at prediction even more highly improbable.

clinamen is encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete ring and capped by the monumental glass dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

DB: Your installations often invite the audience into a sensory, open-ended experience. What role does the visitor play in activating or completing the work?

CBM: When you visit an exhibition, aren’t you yourself sensitive to the presence of other visitors? If they give you the impression of not knowing why they’re there? It can be funny, but it can also be pathetic. If they only look at the works through their cameras or smartphones, and step back without paying attention to the other visitors to frame a masterpiece, I think that’s awful. With my installations, I make it clear to everyone who visits that they can find a place within the work and become an integral part of it momentarily by their mere presence. When I succeed in doing this, I find it makes people more beautiful… I’ve also noticed that when I compose the spaces of my installations using circles or curves, it makes visitors’ trajectories more harmonious and their wandering more fluid than in orthogonal spaces. The simple fact of inviting people to sit down and rest induces attitudes conducive to listening and daydreaming.

DB: In an age of speed and distraction, how do you see your work offering space for slowness, attention, and contemplation?

CBM: I don’t believe my art can change anything in the madness of today’s world, I don’t presume to know what anyone needs, but since I’m invited to present my work, I bring the best I have.

the water surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the Parisian sky through the museum’s dome | photo by Nicolas Brasseur

the installation invites visitors to sit down and slow down | image © designboom

project info:

name: clinamen

artist: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot | @celesteboursiermougenot

curator: Emma Lavigne, Chief Curator and General Director of the Pinault Collection

location: Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, 2 rue de Viarmes, 75001, Paris, France | @boursedecommerce

dates: June 5th – September 21st, 2025

The post céleste boursier-mougenot turns bourse de commerce into immersive aquatic soundscape appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

At Berlin’s Aedes Architecture Forum, the exhibition ‘Five Working Spaces’ invites visitors to glimpse into Ai Weiwei’s studios across continents. On the occasion of the opening on May 23, 2025, designboom spoke exclusively with the artist, uncovering how each workspace embodies his political convictions, personal history, and creative vision. A central focus of the exhibition is Ai Weiwei’s most recent studio in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal, built using traditional Chinese woodworking methods. 

‘My studio is an extension of my body and mental state,’ Ai Weiwei tells designboom. ‘Of course it’s political. Anyone who sees the exhibition can understand — it’s not that I want it to be political. It just is political.’

all images courtesy of Aedes Architecture Forum and Ai Weiwei Studio, unless stated otherwise

ARTIST, ARCHITECT AND ADVOCAT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

Rather than illustrating architectural typologies or design processes, ‘Five Working Spaces’ explores Ai Weiwei’s studios as existential conditions, rooted in the artist’s early experiences of political exile. Born in Beijing, Ai Weiwei spent his formative years in remote regions of China, where his father, the poet Ai Qing, had been banished during the Anti-Rightist Movement. Known for his outspoken critique of authoritarian systems and his advocacy for human rights, Ai Weiwei ranks among the most influential figures in contemporary art and activism. His wide-ranging practice — spanning art, architecture, film, and social engagement — merges traditional Chinese craftsmanship with global aesthetics and personal narrative.

Five Working Spaces on view at Aedes Architecture Forum until July 02, 2025 | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

FIVE WORKING SPACES AT AEDES ARCHITECTURE FORUM IN BERLIN

The exhibition ‘Five Working Spaces’ at Aedes Architecture Forum traces key chapters of the artist’s life through the lens of architecture, presenting five studios located in Beijing, Shanghai, Berlin, and Montemor-o-Novo. Designed, commissioned, and inhabited by Ai Weiwei himself, each workspace mirrors shifting personal and political realities, documented through architectural models, photographs, drawings, and personal texts.

‘What’s similar is that all of them are tied to one individual – me – trying to fit myself into a working condition. But that condition is always changing. It’s more about connecting to my life, to the conditions I was given, the environments I lived in, how I grew up, how I became an architect, how I acted during moments of social and political change,’ he reflects in our conversation.

Ai Weiwei working on still life in his studio, Caochangdi, Beijing, 2000

His first studio in Longzhuashu, Beijing, redefined an austere concrete courtyard with a quiet gesture: planting Danish grass. The transformation was subtle, yet symbolically powerful — an act of reclaiming space through care. In the early 2000s, he designed his compound in the Caochangdi district, also in Beijing, which soon became a hub for artistic collaboration and large-scale installations. Both spaces would later be demolished by authorities, along with others: the Malu Studio near Shanghai in 2011, dismantled shortly after completion, and the Zuoyou Studio in 2018, destroying works still stored inside.

‘I’m used to irrational violence and no explanation. You cannot figure out the logic. You just take it and survive in it,’ the artist recounts, reflecting on these losses. ‘I grew up in that kind of environment. I was born into it. My father was exiled the year I was born. As demonstrated in the exhibition, I lived underground with my father — in a black hole.’

demolition of the Shanghai studio in Malu

In Berlin, Ai Weiwei established a studio in the cellar of a former brewery — an underground, introspective space that resonates with the years he spent in forced exile alongside his father in remote Xinjiang. Tucked away beneath the surface, for the artist, working underground is not only a physical experience, but also an emotional excavation, shaped by reflection and a return to memory.

Speaking to designboom, Ai Weiwei elaborates on this temporal shift: ‘I’m considered a contemporary artist, but my deepest emotions are connected to the past. I’m not familiar with German culture, because I don’t speak the language. I always relate my practice to the past. I appreciate human memory. Without memory, we don’t know who we are or where we come from. Then we can’t appreciate our current condition.’

inside Ai Weiwei’s studio in Berlin, 2018

The most recent of Ai Weiwei’s five working spaces lies in Montemor-o-Novo, a rural town in southern Portugal. The expansive wooden structure draws on traditional Chinese joinery, assembled without nails or screws. Designed with 100 regular columns and a rotated roof that echoes his demolished Malu Studio near Shanghai, the building stands as a monument to craftsmanship and cultural memory. This fifth studio, completed in 2023, resists categorization. Officially registered as a warehouse, it contains no defined program. 

‘Architecture is part of our body — our state of mind and physical condition,’ reviewing the decision to settle in Portugal, Ai Weiwei notes a change in pace and outlook. ‘I want a location that’s peaceful and quiet. A place where you can look at the sky and realize there are stars. In the morning, you can see the sun rays. In the evening, the moon comes up. That fits my psychological condition today.’

timberwork of the Portugal studio in Montemor-o-Novo | image © Yanan Li

Ai Weiwei’s Portugal studio in bird perspective

his fifth studio, completed in 2023

Montemor-o-Novo Studio, nine-part representation model | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

exhibition view | image © Erik-Jan Ouwerkerk

project info: 

name: Five Working Spaces

artist: Ai Weiwei | @aiww
location: Aedes Architecture Forum, Berlin, Germany | @aedesberlin

dates: May 24 – July 02, 2025

The post ‘of course it’s political’: ai weiwei on working spaces in response to power, memory, and loss appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

ABERTO arrives at Maison La Roche in Paris, France for its fourth edition, once again casting contemporary Brazilian art in architectural conversation with Le Corbusier’s modernist masterpiece. For Filipé Assis, the curator behind the concept, the house’s polychromatic walls and open plan were meaningful catalysts. ‘La Roche was projected already to host the client’s art collection,’ he tells designboom in an interview, noting how the team made full use of Le Corbusier’s original hanging system to respect the building’s heritage status. In this unique exhibition setting, forty newly commissioned works by twenty-five Brazilian artists unfold in dialogue with both structure and history. ABERTO4 is on view from May 14th — June 8th, 2025.

At the heart of the exhibition is the lasting imprint of Le Corbusier on Brazilian architecture and design. La Roche becomes a lens through which these connections sharpen, revealing how architectural form seeps into visual culture. ‘The Ministry of Health and Education in Rio was one of the very first skyscrapers in Latin America,’ Assis points out, marking a moment when Le Corbusier’s partnership with Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer initiated a seismic shift in Brazil’s architectural trajectory. These reverberations shaped Brasília, as well as movements like Neo-concrete art and Tropicália music, demonstrating how architecture served as a launchpad for creative expression across many disciplines.

Liuba Wolf (sculptures) | image © Thomas Lannes

between france and brazil

Throughout ABERTO4, the architecture of Maison La Roche frames a chromatic and spatial logic that many of the artists embraced from the outset. ‘Maison La Roche has a curious palette of colors,’ Assis notes, ‘easier to create dialogs with than his later, bolder palettes.’ Works by Luísa Matsushita and Marina Perez Simão respond directly to this chromatic character, deepening the show’s spatial sensibility. Claudia Moreira Salles, one of the exhibition’s curators, emphasizes how ‘color accentuates the perception of space‘ — a principle that guided the positioning and selection of each work within the home’s rooms.

The exhibition also surfaces deeper currents of cultural exchange. Historic documents and models recount Le Corbusier’s urban studies for Rio and São Paulo, while pieces like Oscar Niemeyer’s rarely reproduced Marquesa bench — granted special release by his foundation for the occasion — offer a material embodiment of the friendship between France and Brazil. ‘France welcomed Niemeyer during the Brazilian dictatorship,‘ Assis reflects. ‘This piece is part of that legacy.‘ Overall, ABERTO4 proposes a Brazil drawn together by dialogues between geometry and gesture, art and ideology, and architecture and nationhood.

from left to right: Liuba Wolf (sculpture), Sérgio Camargo (sculpture), Lygia Pape (sculpture), Hélio Oiticica (painting), Lygia Clark (sculpture) | image © Thomas Lannes

in conversation with filipé assis

designboom (DB): As the creator of the ABERTO exhibition concept, what drew you to explore the link between Le Corbusier and modernist architecture in Brazil?

Filipé Assis (FA): The main point that marked modernism in Brazil was the the Ministry of Health and Education in Rio de Janeiro that was projected by Le Corbusier in partnership with Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, and other modernist architects. This was one of the very first skyscrapers of Latin America. Since then, Niemeyer and Costa, the two main architects behind Brasilia, were already saying that Le Corbusier’s influence completely changed their perspective on architecture. From that point on, both architects started to explore their own paths.

When the idea of Brasilia came in the 1950s, it was the main driver for not only architecture, but for creativity in general in Brazil. Because at that time, the Brazilian capital was in Rio. Everything happened during this new concept of Brasilia. in terms of music we had Tropicália. In terms of the arts we had Neoconcretism. So with this exhibition we wanted to show how this interaction of Le Corbusier and Brazilian architecture was so important for the arts as well.

from left to right: Sérgio Camargo (sculpture), Mira Schendel (painting), Aluísio Carvão (painting), Lygia Pape (sculpture), Hélio Oiticica (painting), Lygia Clark (sculpture) | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: How did the architectural setting of La Roche House inform the way you approached the curation and installation of the artworks in ABERTO4?

FA: La Roche was commissioned by Swiss banker and art collector, who was still single when he died. The whole house was was projected already to host his art collection. Le Corbusier designed a hanging system for displaying artwork, which we we are using for the show — the house is a UNESCO landmarked building, so we can’t make any holes.

The show will be divided between historical and contemporary sections. Within the chambre du gardien, a room originally designed for the home’s caretakers, we are displaying old documents and letters illustrating this relationship between Le Corbusier and Brazil. We are also producing and displaying physical models of the building, as well as of some urbanistic studies that Le Corbusier did for both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Within the former gallery that Monsieur La Roche used to hang his collection, we are going to display post war Brazilian art. The rest of the show is contemporary.

Guardian’s Room: Le Corbusier (enameled hand), Roberto Burle Marx (Gouache) and models of the Capanema Palace — Ministry of Education and Health | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: How did you and the curators select contemporary Brazilian artists to respond to this legacy in new ways?

FA: We chose Brazilian artists that already have a relationship with architectural forms — either geometric or more organic. We gave these artists a briefing about the house and about Le Corbusier as an artist. They produced artworks that are related to this story. For instance, Beatriz Milhazes is presenting a collage that’s in dialog with a collage made by Le Corbusier. She was inspired by him as an artist.

Luiz Zerbini painted large canvas of a Brazilian modernist building inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille. You can see that the Brazilian architect drew inspiration from Le Corbusier, and Zerbini drew inspiration from that architect. It’s nice to show these dialogs. We also have Luísa Matsushita, for instance, who explores Le Corbusier’s palette of colors. So every artist chose one point from his work to explore.

Luiz Zerbini | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: Many of the new commissions explore the intersection of geometry and organic forms — how does this visual language connect Brazil’s modernist past to its artistic present?

FA: There is an opposition between the geometric constructivist art, and the other that is linked to the organic, gestural abstraction. The first is linked more to asocializing aspect, while the second is more individualist. These two styles are often linked together because they were based in the same historical moment. But I don’t think this makes any sense, because there’s a fusion between art and ideology. So let’s say that a strong characteristic of Brazilian culture is the fusion of different concepts. Brazil, in the end, is a country that is linked by more bridges than walls.

Red Marquesa bench, Oscar Niemeyer | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: Several works reference political histories, especially Niemeyer’s ties to the French Communist Party. How does the show navigate the relationship between modernist ideals and ideological legacies?

FA: Ideological modernism has run its course in architecture. But if utopias have not come to fruition, the legacy of Brazilian modernism has given us a grammar forms that continues to produce and enable innovative works. Even the Postmodern period references the Modern movement for its forms, and no longer for its ideology.

from left to right: Cícero Dias (painting), Anna Maria Maiolino (sculpture), Luisa Matsushita (painting), Mira Schendel (painting on an easel), and Sidival Fila (textile) | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: Can you talk about the significance of including iconic furniture pieces alongside contemporary artworks in the show?

FA: One especially meaningful work on view is the Marquesa bench designed by Oscar Niemeyer. We chose this piece for several reasons. First of all, because it was designed by Niemeyer who had a connection to Le Corbusier, as I explained. Also because Niemeyer lived in France, a country which welcomed him as a friend during the Brazilian dictatorship back in the 1960s. He did many, many projects there. So as part of the cultural exchange between France and Brazil that celebrates the friendship, we hoped to show a real example of this this friendship.

It’s also worth mentioning that this Marquesa bench is super important because these benches were orignally made for a museum in São Paulo called the Memorial da America Latina. And he never allowed any reproduction of them. And the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation very sensitively allowed for the production of one for us in celebration of ABERTO happening in France.

Maria Klabin (painting) | image © Thomas Lannes

DB: The dialogue between color and space is central to both Le Corbusier’s architecture and many of the works in this exhibition. How did the team approach the chromatic staging of the show?

FA: Maison La Roche has a curious palette of colors. They are easier to create dialogs with than the his later palettes, which include much stronger colors. So when we were choosing the artworks, most of them, as I mentioned, were commissioned by contemporary artists. So the artists themselves took these colors into consideration, as they defined the spaces that they were given to produce these works.

DB: What do you hope visitors will take away from the show?

FA: I would hope that visitors could learn more about this legacy that Le Corbusier left to Brazil, and how the seed of modernism ended up growing into different forms of creativity within the visual arts, design, and architecture. I hope that with this show, visitors can also learn more about our country and our artists.

painting by Anna Maria Maiolino, sculpture by Tunga | image © Thomas Lannes

project info:

name: ABERTO4 | @aberto.art

location: Maison La Roche, 10 Sq. du Dr Blanche, Paris, France

on view: May 14th — June 8th, 2025

photography: © Thomas Lannes | @lannes.thomas

exhibition concept creator: Filipé Assis

curators: Lauro Cavalcanti, Kiki Mazzucchelli, and Claudia Moreira

collaborators: Le Corbusier Foundation, Lucio Costa Estate, Burle Marx Institute, Oscar Niemeyer Foundation
collaborating galleries: Fortes d’Aloia & Gabriel, Mendes Wood DM, Luisa Strina, Nara Roesler, Mennour

The post interview: ABERTO4 at maison la roche traces le corbusier’s impact on brazilian modernism appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

From May 1st to October 19th 2025, London’s Tate Modern presents Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, the artist’s first major solo show in the UK in 20 years. Organized in partnership with Genesis, the exhibition marks the vehicle brand’s first European project under its Art Initiatives program and spans three decades of Suh’s practice, centering on his recurring themes of space, memory, identity, and the idea of home (find designboom’s previous coverage here). During the preview on April 29th, 2025, Dina Akhmadeeva, assistant curator of international art at Tate Modern, shares insights into the exhibition with designboom. ‘We refuse to call the exhibition a retrospective or a survey,’ she notes. ‘Do Ho refutes the idea of a linear time. He thinks of cyclical time, cycles of time, and so this idea of a constant return is essential.’

Renowned for his walk-in fabric sculptures that replicate domestic spaces at full scale, Do Ho Suh transforms personal architecture into collective experience. Visitors move through translucent corridors of pale organza, stitched to trace the contours of homes Suh once inhabited, from Seoul to Providence to London, where physical memory is rendered into space. In the Turbine Hall galleries, new site-specific works such as Nest/s (2024) and Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024) appear alongside rarely seen early works and recent video, drawing, and rubbing projects.

Do Ho Suh, Home Within Home (1/9 Scale) 2025, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home inspires the title of the exhibition

Other pieces in Tate Modern’s exhibition explore the same ideas, more quietly. South Korean artist Do Ho Suh creates Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22) and Company Housing of Gwangju Theater (2012) by rubbing every surface of buildings with pencil or pastel, imprinting the architectural skin onto paper.

The notion of cyclical return anchors the exhibition through Rubbing/Loving: Seoul Home (2013–22), shown publicly here for only the second time since its debut in Australia in 2022. Created in 2013, the work is a delicate paper rubbing of the traditional Korean hanok house Suh’s parents built in the 1970s, during his adolescence. ‘The carpenters who held this huge wealth of knowledge as to how to build this wooden and paper architecture mentioned this phrase to Suh: ”walking the house,” or ‘making the house walk,”’ Akhmadeeva recounts. Though rarely used, the idiom resonated deeply with Suh, inspiring the title of the exhibition.

That poetic phrase has since shaped Suh’s entire practice, one that wrestles with mobility, displacement, and the nature of memory. ‘For Do Ho, this has become the fuelling point for the way that he imagines the core of his practice—this idea of the spaces that we might carry with us as we move through the world (…) thinking through the spaces that hold our memories.’ Interestingly, Suh did not consider the hanok home while living in Seoul; that sense of home only surfaced after his move to the U.S. in the 1990s.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

various pieces stand alongside signature fabric architectures

The exhibition maps Suh’s personal and artistic returns to three cities he has called home—Seoul, New York, and London—across a 30-year career. While his translucent fabric architectures remain his most iconic works, Walk the House broadens the view, incorporating delicate works on paper, intimate drawings, and expansive video installations. Highlights include two new fabric architectures shown alongside Seoul Home, and looping LED videos that, as the co-curator states, ‘do something in conversation with Seoul Home that is an absolutely essential part of what Suh thinks about.’

Throughout, Suh prompts fundamental questions: What does it mean to inhabit a space? To carry it with you? To live among others? These questions echo in Who Am We?, a wallpapered corridor made from thousands of ID photos, emphasizing Suh’s exploration of the collective and the interdependence of identity.

Do Ho Suh, Staircase 2016, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

two site-specific pieces debut at the korean artist’s solo show

Tate’s Turbine Hall hosts two new site-specific works, including Nest/s (2024) and Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024). Nest/s (2024), a commissioned work made for Tate, showcases the latest evolution of Suh’s signature fabric architectures. Though recent, its roots reach back to the 1990s, when Suh first moved to the U.S. ‘He was grappling with what it meant to exist in that space of his studio, and he started measuring,’ mentions Dina Akhmadeeva during our exhibition tour. That act of measuring, a precursor to his fabric structures, parallels the rubbing process. It began with a jacket-like sculpture in 1994 titled Rub 516, formed from cotton and zippers, mapping the space of his New York studio. Nest/s (2024) belongs to Suh’s ongoing Hubs series, what he calls ‘impossible architectures,’ in which overlapping colors signal where distinct spaces intersect. 

For Suh, architecture is inseparable from the body. ‘The way that he thinks about these fabric architectures really has to do with the body of clothing also—really embodying architecture as an experienced thing,’ Akhmadeeva emphasizes. ‘Architecture that doesn’t exist without the bodies that move through it.’ The translucent material requires and invites movement.

In Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul (2024), ‘every single color stands for a particular space or particular location across the world,’ she reveals.

Beyond their spectral elegance, these works also reflect Suh’s deep commitment to collaboration. ‘You’ll see this careful attention to craft and tradition that has been passed on across generations,’ highlights Akhmadeeva, referencing the meticulous hand-stitching by Suh’s teams of sewers in London and Seoul. ‘It’s a tension between the careful memories of an artist’s mental space and the careful process of collaboration, that’s absolutely essential in Do Ho’s generosity,’ she adds.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Bridge Project proposes the ‘perfect home’

The exhibition is the product of a long-term partnership involving Suh’s studio team of eleven, architects, fabricators in Korea, and curators at Tate. ‘We worked almost day-to-day for the last few years to make the show happen,’ Akhmadeeva recalls. ‘It’s not just memory work—it’s architectural, mathematical, and cultural all at once.’

In the final gallery, Suh’s long-running Bridge Project—ongoing since 1999—extends these questions to a planetary scale. It’s a conceptual proposal for a perfect home, located at the precise midpoint between Seoul, New York, and London. ‘It’s totally hypothetical,’ Akhmadeeva says, ‘a home located in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.’ Created in collaboration with anthropologists, philosophers, indigenous elders, and lawyers, the Bridge Project demonstrates how Suh’s gentle, safe containers of memory remain in direct contact with the world.

Do Ho Suh, Nest/s, 2024, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | creation supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | creation supported by Genesis | © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Do Ho Suh, Bridge Project 1999-ongoing, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Do Ho Suh, Bridge Project 1999-ongoing, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

Do Ho Suh, Rubbing/Loving Project: Seoul Home, 2013-2022, installation view, The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House | courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin New York, Seoul and London and Victoria Miro | repurposing supported by Genesis © Do Ho Suh | image by Jai Monaghan © Tate

project info:

name: The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House

artist: Do Ho Suh | @dohosuhstudio

venue: Tate Modern | @tate

location: London, UK
dates: May 1 to October 19, 2025

The post tate modern opens ‘walk the house,’ do ho suh’s first major UK solo exhibition in 20 years appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

A.A. Murakami discusses using robotics and physics to invoke nature in their installations, a technique and practice they describe as ‘ephemeral tech.’ During Milan Design Week 2025, the art collective exhibits two scenographic installations at Museo della Permanente for the show Opposites United: Eclipse of Perceptions, presented with Kia Design and Zero. Several days after the event, Alexander Groves, the half of A.A. Murakami and the design practice Studio Swine alongside Azusa Murakami, sits down with designboom to rehash the nature-inspired robotics installation. It’s a two-part show that visitors go through. The first is The Cave. Just like its name, the only light illuminating the space is the saturated, sunset-colored backlighting along the wall. It’s enough to cast a shadow and form the silhouettes of the replicated ancient animal bones, surfacing from the pool of oil in the middle of the room. 

These artifacts don’t emerge on their own since a large-scale automaton with robotic limbs brings them up, making their outlines visible to the visitors. Alexander Groves tells us that it’s his and Azusa Murakami’s way of showing their interest in the dawn of humanity. ‘We were interested in making replicas of these bones and hearing these ancient sounds, having them emerge from a pool of oil on these robotic limbs that almost have the appearance of bird legs. We wanted to create a very evocative cinematic space using these almost haunting sounds as well as red light flooding the space,’ he says. The robotic installation by A.A. Murakami puts a tech twist on the customary way of showcasing historic artifacts. ‘There’s a divergent moment where technology itself could become conscious. It was using the ancient past to think about the far future,’ adds Alex Groves.

Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves of A.A. Murakami (Studio Swine) | all images courtesy of A.A. Murakami

Contrast plays between ‘the cave’ and ‘beyond the horizon’

Past The Cave, visitors walk through yet another vaguely lit room named Beyond the Horizon. A different ambiance plays the tone of the space. Instead of the light piercing through the viewers’ vision, large bubbles float above their heads, passing for a few seconds before they pop and the mist comes out, forming the shape of clouds. On the walls, hanging automata enable the robotic installation of A.A. Murakami to work. The art collective’s Alex Groves compares the amorphous bubbles to moons gliding through the space. The room contrasts The Cave. Whereas Beyond the Horizon brims with cool blue, seemingly moonlight, The Cave shines like a radiant sunset, invoking the glow of a fire. ‘We wanted to set up a contrast, so you had an interesting journey through the space. It’s setting up a distinction between these two things so they enhance each other—the difference,’ Alex Groves tells us.

The bubbles glide at a glacial pace before they slowly disperse into thin air like fog. The British artist explains to designboom that A.A. Murakami uses a mixture of ingredients to make them for the robotic installations. ‘When you make giant bubbles, it needs to be a more viscous substance that retains water. It’s much thicker. There are different emulsifying agents, but nothing toxic. It’s all safe. Essentially, it’s soaps and surfactants – things that reduce the surface tension of water. It no longer makes a droplet but forms a thin skin,’ he says. It’s not their first time blowing large bubbles into the air, citing their Floating World exhibition at M+ Museum Hong Kong between August 2024 and February 2025. They’ve already produced installations with small bubbles too, one of the first times being New Spring and New Spring Miami (2017). Here, the tree-like structure features branches shaped as curved tubes hanging above the visitors heads. Slowly, these poles pipe out small bubbles, landing on the floor before they lightly burst.

Beyond the Horizon (2024) at Museo della Permanente | exhibition photos by DSL Studio, unless stated otherwise

Ephemeral tech in A.A. Murakami’s robotic installations

During our conversation with A.A. Murakami’s Alex Groves, he mentions the term ‘Ephemeral tech’ a few times. It’s one way they describe what they do, using technology with ethereal materials to create ‘fleeting moments’ and ‘new, unnatural phenomena.’ Ephemeral, when looked up, means transient or brief, like floating bubbles that slowly land or burst, ancient bones that languidly emerge from a pool of oil, or cannoned fog that glacially makes its way in the middle of the room. Tech comes in different forms. With a few of the nature-inspired robotic installations of A.A. Murakami, it can be through the use of automated limbs or mechanisms.

Alex Groves sums up ephemeral tech by saying, ‘when you witness the digital world—watching something on a screen—you’re aware it can’t fade. You can pause it, revisit it, rewind it—it’ll be exactly the same. It doesn’t die. When you encounter nature, if you come across a fox, for example, and you both stop and stare at each other, there’s this awareness that this is an incredibly unlikely gathering of atoms in front of you. You’re both sharing a moment that will never come again. We’re interested in using technology to give you an experience almost like nature. When you’re in the presence of a bubble, you know what’s going to happen. It’s got a life to it. You watch the creation of it, and you watch it dissolve and disappear. The fleeting nature of it adds to its beauty.’

the bubbles glide at a glacial pace before they slowly disperse into thin air like fog

A.A. Murakami is the art division and practice of Studio Swine. Alex Groves and Azusa Murakami are both the masterminds behind these two. Whereas Studio Swine focuses on materiality and how materials can make viewers feel, A.A Murakami and its nature-inspired, tech-driven, and even robotics, installations allow people to live through what they feel. ‘We don’t want to make things on a screen or use projectors, which is what we consider inherited tech. The way we use technology is about bringing materiality into it; not just materials, but states of matter,’ says Alex Groves. He clarifies, however, that their approach isn’t solely robotics because their installations aren’t kinetic in the traditional sense of using robotics to create kinetic art. They use instead these limbs and automated parts to deliver a space, one where visitors meet with fog rings, bubbles, and plasma, the natural phenomena.

When asked if A.A. Murakami considers robotics as co-creators of their installations, Alex Groves tells us it’s about balance. ‘You rely on these robots and technologies to take on part of what’s happening. The other part is, you want physics and the natural world—the laws of nature—to take on the rest. We’re interested in when digital code and electronics transition into the physical realm, where it’s about fluid dynamics, entropy, and intermolecular forces all at play. That’s when it becomes really interesting, because then you get a dance—like how mesmerizing it is to watch the surface of the ocean. There’s a constant dance between the intermolecular forces. We want to do both, but we want to create unnatural phenomena—things that wouldn’t be there without the use of technology,’ he says.

the work appears in the exhibition Opposites United: Eclipse of Perceptions during Milan Design Week 2025

The British artist looks back at how A.A. Murakami comes to life. He and Azusa Murakami founded Studio Swine in 2010. He is armed with fine arts history, and she with architecture, but they both have a background in design after studying at the Royal College of Art. They were interested in exploring materials, shaping them in a certain kind of utility or functionality, hence the birth of Studio Swine, ‘We liked the archetypes of furniture and using furniture as a way of exploring the world around us and possible futures,’ Alex Groves shares with us.

They had a run for it over years, even living in São Paulo and made a furnace that could melt down cans on the street using waste vegetable oil. Then, they moved to Shanghai, explored human hair, and made Hair Highway, reimagining human hair with bio resin, all the while inspired by the notion of the ancient Silk Road. ‘When we started doing more immersive installations that didn’t have such a clear question-and-answer structure, they were more about creating a feeling, an immersive world,’ the British artist says in light of A.A. Murakami being shaped naturally after their New Spring installation in 2017, showcased in Milan. 

the display showcases giant, amorphous bubbles emerging from hanging automata and transforming into clouds

The art collective started working for and with art museums, even having robotic installations and permanent collections in MOMA in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and M+ in Hong Kong. On May 4th, 2025, they host their first solo presentation in a U.S. museum and their largest to date anywhere. It’s in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, an exhibition named ‘Floating World,’ running until September 21st, 2025. Four of A.A. Murakami’s biggest robotics and nature-inspired installations are present, including Beyond the Horizon which was showcased at Milan Design Week 2025 as well as Under a Flowing Field (2023). 

The latter features glass tubes filled with krypton gas, arranged as a field of lightning-like white lines above the visitors head, piercing through the color-tinted space in sequences. ‘This is a major moment for us because we started A.A. Murakami in 2020,’ says Alex Groves. ‘We’ve got many shows this year in different art museums. I think some people might know A.A. Murakami and not know Studio Swine, and vice versa. We’re grateful they’re reaching different audiences.’ And the viewers, perhaps unknown to them, are gifted a transient yet transcendental piece of A.A. Murakami’s profound connection with art, nature, and tech, articulated through a series of robotics installations.

The Cave at Museo della Permanente in Milan

the bones emerge from a pool of oil | image by Studio Cratere

a large-scale automaton with robotic limbs brings up the replicated animal bones

The Passage of Ra at The Miraikan in Tokyo, Japan

Silent Fall at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, October 2022

Beyond the Horizon, Commissioned by M+, 2024

Under a Flowing Field (2023) to appear at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

project info:

name: A.A. Murakami (Studio Swine) | @a.a.murakami, @studioswine

founders: Alexander Groves, Azusa Murakami

exhibition name: Opposites United: Eclipse of Perceptions

event: Milan Design Week 2025

museum: Museo della Permanente

location: Filippo Turati, 34, Milan, Italy,

dates: April 7th to 13th, 2025

photography: DSL Studio, Studio Cratere | @dsl__studio, @studio.cratere

The post ephemeral tech: A.A. murakami on using robotics and physics to create nature in installations appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Returning to Milan Design Week after ten years, Dutch artist duo Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of DRIFT once more redefine how movement, environment, and technology intersect. In collaboration with Audi, their latest installation, Drift Us, unfolds in the peaceful courtyard of the Portrait Milano Hotel. The work forms an immersive robotic landscape where kinetic bulbs sway in response to visitors’ movements, mimicking wind in a field of grass. Like much of DRIFT’s work, this luminous project is grounded in natural phenomena, yet engineered through complex design systems where organic and synthetic experiences meet.

While each softly glowing ‘bulb’ may evoke the image of an onion or seed, their design is informed by functional necessity. ‘Inside the bulbs on the floor, there are three weights,’ Gordijn tells designboom during a visit to the Audi House of Progress during Milan Design Week 2025. ‘These weights move in and out of balance. It’s how the installation moves — with a physical imbalance.’ The entire structure is powered by custom motors, sensors, and software designed in-house by DRIFT, underscoring their hands-on approach to fabrication. As Nauta notes, ‘Everything you see is custom — from the PCB to the hardware to the robotics. Even the weights are cast by us.’ The result is a field of ethereally swaying forms, each individually responsive but united in rhythm. It’s a choreography of imbalance engineered to feel entirely natural.

images courtesy of Studio DRIFT | all photos by Ronald Smits, unless stated otherwise; video © designboom

a choreography of sensory rhythms

Rather than just mimicking natural behavior at the Audi House of Progress during Milan Design Week 2025, Drift Us becomes a site where nature is re-enacted through computation and material innovation. Each bulb, sheathed in a specially woven nylon textile developed over two years by DRIFT in collaboration with the Textile Museum in Tilburg, responds to invisible currents of human presence. ‘People that move through the installation affect the bulbs as if they were the wind,’ Gordijn explains. ‘We want people to feel that they are a force of nature moving through this environment.’

The artists‘ spatial strategy is innately architectural in how the installation builds a physical language through light, motion, and emotion. The field of bulbs orchestrates a sensory flow that connects one body to another. ‘When you gather in a space like this, you start moving with the piece,’ says Nauta. ‘Then automatically, your heartbeat almost adjusts to that rhythm.’

DRIFT’s vision taps into the innate rhythms that connect us. ‘Calm is our normal state of mind,’ Gordijn reflects. ‘We use these environments to evoke a physical response in people. It happens automatically.’ That ethos will soon find a permanent home: later this year, DRIFT will open their long-anticipated museum in Amsterdam. The largest single-artist museum in Europe, it is set to extend the artists’ inquiry into how technology, nature, and collective rhythm can shape both built environments and shared emotional landscapes.

the installation, Drift Us, unfolds in the peaceful courtyard of the Portrait Milano Hotel

a dialogue with drift during milan design week 2025

designboom (DB): It’s so nice to be here with you at this immersive installation — it’s very interactive as well. The first thing that I noticed is the shape. I’m wondering where you got the design inspiration because when I first saw it, it reminded me of an onion!

Ralph Nauta (RN): We get that a lot!

Lonneke Gordijn (LG): It does look like onion, it’s true. We focused on the wind in the grass, and we needed a way to move the grass. The first idea was just slim poles with strings. But the way this moves is all about balance and imbalance. Inside the bulbs on the floor, there are three weights These weights move in and out of balance. It’s how the installation moves — with a physical imbalance, and we needed a way to contain that. It’s shaped as some kind of seed, although it’s not literally one thing that we mimic. Our inspiration is always nature.

the work forms an immersive robotic landscape

RN: Its shape is informed by its function. This outcome is created from the need for the space for the weights to move, and trying to find the most aesthetically logical shape. The ‘tail,’ as we call it, goes over the bowl in a very elegant way.

LG: We choose the materials for their translucency because we work with lights inside.

RN: And the material is created by us. It’s not something that you can buy.

LG: We developed it over about two years, together with the Textiel Museum in the Dutch city, Tilburg. It’s one piece of woven nylon fabric that is applied over the bulb. Toward the top it’s pleated and less translucent. Towards the bottom of the bulb, it branches out and has more transparency. This is how we drift through a process and how we find the form and the result.

kinetic bulbs sway in response to visitors’ movements

DB: Can you speak about the materials and how these bulbs were built?

RN: Everything you see is custom — from the printed circuit board (PCB), the hardware, the software, and the robotics. Even the weights that are moving within the piece are cast by us. It sets us apart from most artists. We really develop everything from scratch.

LG: And besides the physical objects, we have developed a software whereby we actually play with the wind. And so people that move through the installation affect the bulbs as if they were the wind. We want people to feel that they are a force of nature moving through this environment. We want to transport people to a different place and have, in that sense, a different experience of an environment.

the movement mimics wind in a field of grass

DB: One of your signatures, design-wise, is your use of light. We can see it here in this installation. I see that the color of the bulbs’ lights is different from those of the ‘tails.’ Is there an intentional decision behind these two types of light?

LG: Yes! We often work with color, but always in a very soft and deliberate way. We chose only colors that blend together elegantly and softly.

DB: How do these weights work? How the bulbs are powered?

LG: There are three motors inside each bulb — every weight has a motor, and these are powered by a wired connection. The communication, meanwhile, is wireless.

RN: It’s the physical displacement of weight that creates movement. That was also the main challenge of creating this. We could have installed it on a spindle that could pivot and rotate, but then you’re just mimicking natural behavior. This is actual natural behavior. We also have to calculate the counterbalance, because if you go in one direction, it will automatically have a feedback on the other side. But if you want to counterbalance to the other way, it needs to move in a specific order to stop in the right position. So we had to solve it as a mathematical problem.

LG: The bulb’s movement reacts to imbalances of the three weights. If one weight moves outward, that side of the bulb actually becomes more heavy and the balance shifts. But once another side becomes more heavy, the bulb turns accordingly. And if two weights move out, the bulb moves in another direction. So with these weights moving in and out, we can create smaller and larger movements in all different directions.

Drift Us, Audi House of Progress, Milan Design Week 2025 | image © designboom

DB: How are the weights coordinated?

LG: They communicate with our system. So when people walk among the installation, they interact with sensors throughout the system. And as you activate it, it is read as different types of ‘wind.’ It creates a choreography that is very calming. But some movements might trigger more of a ‘storm,’ where the colors become more vibrant, the ‘wind’ is more intense, and the bulbs moves faster. It mimics gusts of wind moving through the space. So the bulbs do not move all at once. They each move a split-second apart from each other, and together it’s like a soft wave.

DB: Ralph was discussing how he perceives movement, and how he was influenced by the winds of the Netherlands. What is your perception of movement in general?

RN: Movement is very important in our work in general — it’s a translation of energy. You can bring people into a certain state of mind by surrounding them with a specific movement. It can be stressful, or it can bring us in tune with each other.We’re experimenting with that a lot. Even the museum that we’re building now in Amsterdam — it will be the largest single art museum in Europe — it’s only about that.

Drift Us, Audi House of Progress, Milan Design Week 2025 | image © designboom

RN (continued): It’s about bringing each other in a certain rhythm, a natural flow that can connect us and bind us together. When you gather in a space like this, you start moving with the piece. Then automatically, your heartbeat almost adjusts to that rhythm. Your whole personality becomes part of that rhythm. That’s how you can actually start communicating with the people next to you because you’re all in sync.

LG: Our bodies naturally respond to an environment. If someone is very high-energy, you can also get very high-energy — or you step away. You respond. So we use this environment to evoke a physical response in people. It goes automatically. We deliberately use very calming rhythms because naturally, our bodies want to move towards calmness. Calm is our normal state of mind. Constantly, all day long, we’re seeking to be in our natural state of mind.

There are all sorts of forces that drive up the energy. But ultimately what we need is this constant calm. What Ralph said about these movements, they trigger something in us and lead us to a different state. But if it happens to me, it happens to you. We are getting on the same wavelength, and suddenly we can communicate much easier. And we discovered that through making these artworks.

Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn | image © designboom

project info:

name: Drift Us at Audi House of Progress

artist: DRIFT | @studio.drift

collaborator: Audi | @audi

event: Milan Design Week 2025

location: Portrait Milano Hotel, Corso Venezia 11 (main entrance) or via S. Andrea, 10 (side entrance)
on view: April 7th to 13th, 2025

photography: © Ronald Smits, © designboom

The post DRIFT on its robotic, softly swaying installation for AUDI at portrait milano appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

Tatiana Trouvé weaves constellations, maps, dreams, and more into chair sculptures, installations, and drawings for her major solo exhibition ‘The Strange Life of Things’ at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. On view between April 6th, 2025 and January 6th, 2026, the Pinault Collection hosts the show, curated by Caroline Bourgeois, senior curator of Pinault Collection, and James Lingwood, independent curator and former co-director of Artangel. designboom visits the exhibition a day before it opens to the public, interviewing James Lingwood about the show’s curation. 

‘I think these are the themes that come from her work. She’s very interested in the idea of the journey, and what she conjures up through her sculptures and drawings are sort of imaginative worlds. But they also relate closely to the world we live in; maybe even have lived or will be living in the future. What we began to map out in the exhibition was a kind of journey through space and time, manifested through sculptures, installations, drawings, and so on. I like the way that her work pulls you back and forth between past, present, and future. Between the studio and the street, from the forest or the quarry to the cosmos,’ the co-curator tells designboom.

The Guardian, 2022 | all images courtesy of Tatiana Trouvé and Gagosian © Tatiana Trouvé by SIAE 2024, unless stated otherwise; photo by Florian Kleinefenn 

Themes of navigation and constellations among the sculptures

Navigation, constellations, and dreams are recurring themes in the French-Italian visual artist’s works. They compose the 30 rooms that make up Palazzo Grassi’s exhibition space. Past the entrance, the marble floor becomes an asphalt ground, topped with manhole covers and metal plates cast in bronze, silver, and gold. It feels like walking around the city. When seen from above, Hors-sol (2025) evokes the view of the constellations, one that the viewers look at from the high-up. Then on the first floor, viewers walk through Navigation Gate (2024), which is a series of bronze-cast roots and branches forming two massive gates and walkways.

James Lingwood, who leads the tour before the opening, says that the artist creates the piece as a reimagination of the small stick charts used by the sailors to navigate their ways around the Marshall Islands. This wayfinding technique, along with the metal covers depicting constellations, continues throughout the other sculptures of the artist. Take L’appuntamento (2025). It’s a maze filled with domestic objects: glass panels with white paste marking, twisted metal bed frames and their springs, hardened cardboard boxes holding the panels together; rods that stick out, bent yet still sharp. At the end of the room, there’s a small glass door that peeks into the other room, like one of the secret doors found in homes. 

The Guardian, 2024 | photo by Thomas Lannes

Tatiana Trouvé’s experiences as sculptures at Palazzo Grassi

Tatiana Trouvé translates her personal experiences into sculptures. During the roundtable interview, designboom asks the artist how she processes her thoughts in times of disorientation and doubt, which she admits to experiencing and confronting. She says it’s easier to unpack what she feels into physical artworks rather than words or describing them. It’s the same with her experiences. In June 2023, the French police shot the 17-year-old and North-African-descent Nahel Merzouk in Montreuil, the commune where Tatiana Trouvé works, in the east of Paris. 

During this period, the artist gathered materials from the days and nights of the unrest that followed: burned garbage bins, melted plastics, scorched shopfronts. Two years later, she brings these enlarged items to Palazzo Grassi in Venice as Sitting Sculpture (2024) and a large wall. The former suspends these objects used in the unrest over a bench, a form of reminiscing about the incident. The latter translates into an abstracted and massive panel, colored mostly in white and embedded with jutting, gritty details. For the artist, it elaborates and registers the rage people felt and expressed, the one she saw up close and lived through.

The Guardian, 2020 | photo by Florian Kleinefenn

In many of the rooms, viewers find sculptures of chairs, a series named The Guardians, with domestic items forged in bronze and brass hanging, sitting, wrapped around the seats: clothes, shoes, blankets, cushions, bags, mementos. The chairs themselves allude to when the artist used to work as a guard in the south of Italy, where she would sit for hours, waiting, monitoring. She feels invisible, yet what’s visible to her is the inner life of the guards, how their solitariness can equate to them pondering. The series attempts to make a statement on this invisibility and visibility. 

On top of some chairs pile enlarged books that cover a wide range of subjects: natural sciences, speculative fiction, anthropology, anarchism, indigenous people. The literature is a peek into the alternative systems and wealth of knowledge that the artist draws from, reads, studies, and takes in, many of which are authored by women. Sitting on top of these objects are cushions, at times even books, shaped from marble, onyx, and sodalite. They hint at the everyday items that the artist surrounds herself with, giving the audience slices of her personal life and the experiences she has lived through without being explicit.

The Guardian, 2020 | photo by Florian Kleinefenn

On the second floor, the sculptures take a step back to make way for a selection of large-scale drawings from the series Les Dessouvenus as well as 70 works on paper from the artist’s studio, exhibited at Palazzo Grassi for the first time. The inner self and private world of Tatiana Trouvé slowly come through. Misty illustrations of bedrooms, gardens, and familiar places, spaces, and dreams for the artist spring onto her canvases. 

Their backdrops are in lush green, blue, and natural colors, almost over empowering enough to hide the objects and scenography presented. In a way, it’s the artist’s attempt to share her personal world with the viewers at a distance, invited but not yet let in. The theme of self peaks in the last room called L’inventario (2003-2024). It recreates the studio of the artist, her workshop, and all the objects that fill it up, reproduced in bronze, silver, and gold. 

Somewhere In The Solar System, 2017 | photo by Roman März

Inside L’inventario (2003-2024), there’s an empty space in the middle for visitors to walk around, and slabs of wood hang on the three sides of the windowless room. Different items in multiple quantities come into view: locks, shoe repair, ropes, dried flowers hanging upside down, mini handbags and their replicas, stools, tablets of the bygone days, pine cones, miniature coral reefs, discarded tree branches. 

The stillness in the room settles. For a moment, viewers inside Palazzo Grassi stand with the objects Tatiana Trouvé uses in her practice, those she collects and finds fascinating. They see the items she hangs around her sculptures and includes in her drawings. They look around and observe the pieces that keep her art together, the ones that translate how she feels and thinks: the dreams, constellations, disorientation, and doubt.

Notes on Sculpture, April 27th, “Maresa”, 2022 | photo by Robert McKeever

left: Sitting Sculpture (2024) | image © designboom

exhibition view of The Strange Life of Things | image © designboom

left: Tatiana Trouvé, Untitled, 2022, from the series Les dessouvenus, 2013– | image © designboom

Le voyage vertical, from the series Les dessouvenus, 2022 | photo by Thomas Lannes

L’inventario 2003-2024 | image © designboom

project info:

exhibition name: The Strange Life of Things

curators: Caroline Bourgeois, James Lingwood | @bourgeois0490, @james.lingwood

artist: Tatiana Trouvé | @tatianatrouve

collection: Pinault Collection | @boursedecommerce

institution: Palazzo Grassi | @palazzo_grassi

location: Campo San Samuele, Venice, Italy

photography: Florian Kleinefenn, Thomas Lannes, Roman März, Robert McKeever | @floriankleinefenn, @lannes.thomas, @roman_maerz

The post palazzo grassi in venice exhibits tatiana trouvé’s sculptures and drawings in major solo show appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

As part of Swire Properties’ Arts Month 2025 in Hong Kong, ArtisTree Selects: The Jewel System by Sara Shakeel welcomes visitors into a celestial installation merging AI-generated concepts with traditional South Asian embroidery. On this occasion, designboom partnered with ArtisTree to host a discussion with the multidisciplinary artist, as well as with digital art professional, Sylvia Wang. Moderated by designboom Editor-in-Chief, Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou, the panel, titled Embodying the Digital: Translating AI and Digital Art into Physical Forms, unpacks themes such as the role of AI in contemporary art, the human impulse to materialize digital ideas, and the emergence of phygital works, to ponder the future of these two realms.

artist Sara Shakeel inside her installation ArtisTree Selects: The Jewel System

all images courtesy of ArtisTree unless stated otherwise

Centering this conversation is the ArtisTree Selects: The Jewel System by Sara Shakeel, which reinterprets the solar system as an immersive, bejeweled map. Vast planetary forms — hand-embroidered by artisans using over 3.9 million vintage glass crystals — reflect Shakeel’s fascination with cosmic storytelling which she first began exploring as digital collages. Alongside this work, Genesis in Jewels captures the primordial moment of the Big Bang through layers of embroidered fabric and suspended crystals forming a celestial tapestry amid a sweeping black net. Read on for key takeaways from the conversation, and don’t miss the chance to experience the installation in person, on view at Two Taikoo Place in Hong Kong’s Quarry Bay until April 27, 2025.

the composition of vast planetary forms were hand-embroidered by 80 Pakistani artisans

bridging digital concepts and artisanal craftsmanship

Sara Shakeel, born in Pakistan and now based in London, is known for her cosmic concepts and has continued to build bridges between digital artistry and physical craftsmanship throughout her career. She begins the conversation with designboom by reflecting on how she has embraced digital tools as a collaborative hand to enhance her exploration of art in more diverse forms.

‘AI is just another tool for an artist — just like a sculptor’s chisel or a painter’s brush,’ Sara Shakeel says. ‘But, of course, AI has no soul, so it needs an artist’s touch to give it life, which I tried to do by creating The Jewel System.’

designboom Editor-in-Chief, Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou, moderated a panel, titled Embodying the Digital: Translating AI and Digital Art into Physical Forms

Shakeel explains that while her practice originates in the digital realm, her desire to create immersive, physical experiences drives her to translate these pieces into tactile art. This not only brings creations into ‘the real world’, but also gives life to her artwork so viewers can engage on a different physical and emotional level.

‘As human beings, we need to have that tactile sensation with something you can touch, feel, see, and experience,’ she continues.

Sara Shakeel and Sylvia Wang joined designboom under the accompanying Genesis in Jewels tapestry

Although the concept of The Jewel System was first imagined virtually, the starting point of its creation was a profoundly physical and spiritual journey rooted in Shakeel’s Pakistani heritage. The artist recounts roaming narrow bazaar alleys in Karachi where she was approached by a retailer selling bags and bags of vintage crystals, which were then used to craft the surface of the planets. The colorful jewels were applied using traditional techniques of metallic embroidery and crystal embellishment to construct intricate patterns reminiscent of those adorning royal textiles. This process, she explains, was a collaboration in every sense of the word, as she worked with a team of 80 local artisans and sought to channel each of their energies into the work.

Shakeel goes on to emphasize the role of intention in artistic creation: ‘There should always be an intention behind what you create. If it comes from a clear place, AI will help you create the most beautiful thing.’

the installation reinterprets the solar system as an immersive, bejeweled map

opportunities amid rising interest in phygital art

Expanding on the fusion of digital and physical creation, digital art professional Sylvia Wang highlights how the trend of phygital art has grown over the years to offer many new opportunities, as well as challenges, for the creative ecosystem. She points to the growing demand for art that extends beyond traditional galleries or digital platforms, as collectors increasingly seek more immersive experiences. Shakeel echoes this sentiment, noting that while her collectors appreciate her digital work, they are increasingly drawn to the tactile and experiential aspects of her installations. In response, she has been refining her practice to strike a balance between her digitally conceptualized pieces and their transformation into immersive, physical experiences.

the planet’s intricate patterns are reminiscent of those adorning royal textiles

Though, while the advent of these new technologies and their intersection with art allows collectors and audiences to experience works across multiple dimensions — tangible and intangible — its accessibility for creators has meant an influx in experimental artworks being created. Wang also acknowledges growing excitement among institutions for virtual art following the boom of NFTs, noting how Hong Kong’s M+ Museum has embraced the medium in its collections, showcasing works like Beeple’s Human One among other AI-assisted pieces.

‘As well as being hugely popular in other global institutes, it is still an increasing trend in Asia that people are so supportive of digital art and its presence in museums,’ Wang notes.

Sara Shakeel merges AI-generated concepts with traditional South Asian embroidery

the future of visual art and ai

Looking ahead, both panelists agree that creatives will continue to push the boundaries between digital and physical art, increasingly blurring the intersection between the two. With hope, Wang concludes that virtual spaces in the near future will afford artists more possibilities and potential to create in forms not confined to any dimension, medium, or scale.

‘Probably in many years, there won’t even be a definition about who is a digital artist, or who is a physical artist. It’s just about an artist who is telling a story, history, or memory. And AI or other technologies will be just tools for the artist to realize this,’ adds the digital art professional.

the colorful jewels were applied using traditional techniques of metallic embroidery and crystal embellishment

the Lunchtime Forum panel took place during Swire Properties’ Arts Month 2025

the talk unpacked the role of AI in contemporary art and the emergence of phygital works

digital art professional Sylvia Wang (left), artist Sara Shakeel (center) and designboom Editor-in-Chief Sofia Lekka Angelopoulou (right) formed the panel

visitors can see both installations at Two Taikoo Place

Genesis in Jewels captures the primordial moment of the Big Bang

the tapestry is shaped from over 3.9 million vintage glass crystals

layers of embroidered fabric and suspended crystals form a celestial tapestry amid a sweeping black net

project info:

name: ArtisTree Selects: The Jewel System

artist: Sara Shakeel

program: Swire Properties’ Arts Month

dates: 22 March – 27 April, 2025

location: Two Taikoo Place, Quarry Bay, Hong Kong

The post sara shakeel on bridging AI & artisanal craftsmanship for celestial installation in hong kong appeared first on designboom | architecture & design magazine.

A cluster of iridescent oyster shells echo hums of longing along Abu Dhabi’s corniche. With her installation Homesickness, Farah Al Qasimi creates a sonic ode to the sea, drawing on her multimedia background to explore themes of memory. Amid surfaces crafted from milled aluminum and coated in shimmering paint, the oysters cradle a soundscape that evokes the rooted relationship between the Gulf’s communities and their waters — ‘Homesickness honors the tradition of pearl diving that has influenced the economic and cultural landscape of the Emirates,’ the Emirati artist tells designboom.

The speakers embedded into each of the pearls emit a soothing five-channel composition that captures songs of yearning, reimagining a traditional chant sung by the wives of pearl divers as they wish for their safe return home. The sculpture is one of over 50 interventions scattered across the emirate that make up the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial, which infuses new layers and perspectives across spaces of routine encounters.

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

farah al qasimi’s installation creates a sonic ode to the sea

Homesickness’ soundscape is inspired by Tob, Tob Ya Bahar, the traditional song of women who awaited the safe return of sailors and divers. It begins with a simple harmony of five individual voices that gradually and gently morph into a more synthetic, spatial chorus, evoking ‘fog, buoys bobbing on the tide, and call-and-response chants,’ as Farah Al Qasimi notes. The physical and auditory sculpture anthropomorphizes the pearls, which, missing their other halves of the shell, sing songs of yearning as they remain rooted in the sand, waiting in place.

Positioned by the shoreline, each of the oversized sculptures reflects the ocean’s cultural and economic significance that resonate across the Gulf, speaking to both personal and collective histories. For the multimedia artist, who was born in Abu Dhabi, Homesickness draws on the heritage of its selected site while speaking to its many daily encounters.‘I grew up spending plenty of time on the Corniche, so it has been great to have work there and watch people take it in. Some sit in the middle and meditate, while others draw their names in the sand,’ she shares with designboom.

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

reactivating the city at public art abu dhabi biennial

These spontaneous interactions echo the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial’s theme, Public Matter, which holds focus on inclusivity and accessibility. Co-curator Carmen Hassan notes that this initiative seeks to reimagine urban spaces by embedding artworks into the city’s rhythms, encouraging residents to engage with their surroundings in new ways. The curatorial team emphasizes the biennial’s role in reactivating the city through public art for all of the emirate’s ecosystems to enjoy. Backdropped by the shore as you walk along the Corniche, one can see cats have made themselves at home in the curves of the shells; children play in the sand; and friends climb over around the oysters as they listen to the gentle soundscape.

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

image © designboom

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

Farah Al Qasimi, Homesickness, Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024 – 2025 © Lance Gerber

image © designboom

image © designboom

project info:

name: Homesickness 

artist: Farah Al Qasimi | @frequentlyaskedquestion

location: Abu Dhabi, UAE

photographer: Lance Gerber | @lance.gerber

event: Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial | @publicartabudhabi

dates: 15th November, 2024 — 30th April, 2025

organizer: Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi

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