Kia returns to Milan Design Week 2025 with the third edition of Opposites United, a seven-day festival shaped by dialogue, live performance, and site-specific installations. Created in collaboration with cultural platform ZERO, the festival takes over Museo della Permanente with a wide-ranging program that explores the concept of “form” across disciplines.
DESIGN
As in previous years, Opposites United gathers an international group of artists, designers, scholars, and musicians. Together, they explore how creative processes intersect with perception, movement, and thought. Kia’s Design Team anchors the experience with an adaptive installation that transforms the museum space into a platform for talks, music, and visual experimentation.
The 2025 edition takes on the theme Eclipse of Perceptions, using the rare astronomical event as both metaphor and framework. Just as a solar eclipse alters our view of the sky, this edition of Opposites United focuses on moments where distant disciplines briefly align, creating new paths of inquiry. Through this lens, the festival invites its participants to revisit what feels familiar and to reconsider how form connects to meaning.
Over the past three years, Opposites United has built a reputation for its format, neither exhibition nor symposium, but a hybrid designed for active engagement. The program includes five debates, a symposium, and twelve musical performances, creating a space for critical dialogue and shared discovery. Each element connects to Kia’s broader approach to design, one that invites feedback and adapts through exchange.
The visual arts program presents two major contributions. Artist Philippe Parreno brings a new edition of his long-running Marquee series to Museo della Permanente. This 4.8-meter-wide canopy uses translucent acrylic, flashing bulbs, and neon tubes, echoing 1950s cinema signage. The work doesn’t operate in isolation, it reacts to the live events inside the museum, using light as a way to register and reflect public activity.
Artist duo A.A.Murakami, based between London and Tokyo, contributes two works. On the ground floor, The Cave introduces a setting shaped by sound, vapor, and mechanical movement. Machines rise and sink through still water while bone flutes and conch horns emit ghostlike tones. Crimson light distorts the perception of space, drawing from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to collapse past and future into one continuous experience.
Elsewhere in the building, A.A.Murakami presents Beyond The Horizon, their largest installation to date, which arrives in Milan after a presentation at M+ Museum in Hong Kong. The piece features suspended machines that release vapor forms, which expand, drift, and eventually disappear, inviting viewers to consider impermanence not just as theme, but as physical condition.
The live program extends the festival’s conceptual grounding into public exchange. Speakers include designer Martino Gamper, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, philosopher Reza Negarestani, artist Nathalie Du Pasquier, curator Andrea Lissoni, and A.A.Murakami. Each talk acts as a provocation, using prior editions of the festival as reference points while developing new lines of inquiry.
Music plays a central role in the program, with performances ranging from classical to experimental. Avant-garde organist Kali Malone brings meditative tension to the space, while DJ and artist Julianna Huxtable introduces layered electronic sets. Tirzah offers stripped-down vocals and intimate songwriting, and Kelly Moran fuses piano with processed sound in compositions that shift between structure and improvisation.
Through these contributions, Opposites United continues to build its identity not through repetition but through momentum. The 2025 edition doesn’t present a finished narrative. Instead, it frames creative work as a process shaped by attention, presence, and exchange, where perception does not stay fixed but moves with the people, light, sound, and thought that pass through it.
