• Kia unveils Design Cultural Communication Project during seven-day event from 15 April at the Museo della Permanente in Milan, Italy
• Exhibition to elevate design culture of ‘Opposites United’ through collaboration with artists in diverse fields
• Open and courageous artworks encourage creativity based on the imagination of crossing boundaries and expanding ideas 

Kia is presenting its Design Cultural Communication Project at the 2024 Milan Design Week. Various renowned artists will introduce new works of art inspired by Kia’s ‘Opposites United’ design philosophy, with the project housed at the Museo della Permanente in Milan, Italy from April 15 to 21. 

During last year’s event, Kia showcased its design philosophy and engaged in a broader discussion on design through the Opposites United Exhibition, where a small community of participants shared their responses and thoughts. 

This year’s exhibition, however, will learn and evolve through dialogue and conversations with participants in various fields – a bold, exploratory move to enhance Kia’s creativeculture rather than a monologue on the brand’s own design story. 

Both current and former participants, including performers, artists, and exhibition planners, will foster cultural creativity by communicating directly with anyone visiting the Milan Design Week. This will be facilitated through three varied styles of art installation: Personal and Collective, Tangible and Intangible, and Finite and Infinite. 

Personal and Collective

The personal and the collective sphere represent two opposite ways of approaching life and understanding the world. One does not, however, exclude the other. This is expressed through the pairing of Anna Galtarossa’s kaleidoscopic multi-sensory installation, ‘The Spirit of Disco,’ with Riccardo Benassi’s conceptual ‘Daily Dense Dance Desiderio’. 

While Galtarossa invites the viewer to travel through the artist’s personal perspective, projecting her experience beyond spatial limits by integrating the material world with augmented reality, Benassi introduces a digital world of techno-thoughts, reflecting on the ecstatic and trance-like moments of collective practices with a conceptual, monochromatic work. 

Tangible and Intangible

The significance of scent is often overlooked due to the modern obsession with appearance, but a sense of smell can weave space and time in unprecedented ways, opening new possibilities for perception and expanding the experience of the world. What about the smell of something that doesn’t exist, though, the idea of a possible scent, based on the concept of Opposites United? 

Multidisciplinary artist Sissel Tolaas brilliantly utilizes sci-fi industrial components in ‘whereareWEarewhere’ a high-tech apparatus conceived to distribute a new and invisible architecture of senses. Pushing the boundaries of perception to generate what will be remembered by many as ‘the smell of Opposites United 2024,’ Tolaas expands the realm of perception to deliver the aroma of the future. 

Finite and Infinite

A creative partnership between Colombian Danilo Grande and Chinese Benny Lai, Led Pulse is the demonstration that East and West are two opposites whose cultural and philosophical synthesis can set new frontiers in the realms of art and technology. Their patented Neuronal LED technology determines a space to be lived in by the audience and that, in return, lives a life of its own. 

‘The Dragon0 Universe’ stands simultaneously as a stage ready to host daily musicians and performers, and as a self-sufficient creature: a cyborg, a digital and mechanical dragon. Performances spark reflections about the dualism unfolding between the individual and the collective, while artistic practices rooted in analog, folkloristic, popular, and classical realms espouse new visions which find application in the digital dimension of both Led Pulse’s work and of the instruments adopted.

This year’s exhibition is designed to invite visitors to enter a world free from imaginative limitations, in which there is no longer any dependency on the framework of implementation. It is an invitation to a new world of sensation that goes beyond boundaries, realms, and authority.