Ten unmissable design exhibitions in autumn

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Lina Bo Bardi. The Poetics of Survival

Dialogues, appointments, transversal formats open to multidisciplinary dialogues, stretching the timeline to draw on history: for the design world, this October is a month of in-depth explorations

What does it mean to design today? The crucial question is posed by Joseph Grima, curator of the first, highly anticipated Design Triennial at the Walker Art Center in Minnesota. Designing today means understanding design as an architecture of universal values, in which words such as spirituality, emotional connection and a sense of community subvert the traditional rules of the production process. It means looking at the history of countries that are trying to rebuild a present for the new generations on the rubble left by wars and dictatorships, or imagining pushing the horizon of creativity where conflicts still rage and thought becomes a concrete act of resistance. Finally, it means understanding the historical memory of its key figures, being aware of the role and strength of women, while also leaving room for joy, recognizing in the lightness of a note the beauty of a city (Milan) that is still capable of surprising us. From Minneapolis to the most complex geographies on the planet, an itinerary that reminds us how much the true strength of the project lies in its ability to cure, reconstruct and transform every idea into an outpost of irreducible hope.

Walker Design Triennial: Beyond Materialism, Minneapolis

Curated by Joseph Grima, Beyond Materialism inaugurates the first Design Triennial at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. At a time when the concept of wealth no longer seems to correspond to that of well-being, the exhibition investigates a new design sensibility: about 50 new and recent works by 26 designers and collectives from over 10 countries are divided into 4 sections. These are the chapters through which Grima shifts his gaze from the production system to a more immaterial dimension, defined by transversal and universal values: spirituality, emotional connection, sense of community. To these values the curator entrusts the possibility of prefiguring other ways of inhabiting the future: “We need new metrics for prosperity,” he observes, indicating in the selection on stage a generation that is trying to supersede the logic of consumerism. The exploration begins with After Materials: Historical Notes, and the past becomes the key to understanding the changes underway: from the Shakers to Ettore Sottsass Jr., Buckminster Fuller, Nathalie Du Pasquier and Theaster Gates, a genealogy of experiences that have progressively moved design beyond the mere functional dimension. This is followed by A New Poetics: The Techno-Craftspeople, which, through the works of Germane Barnes, Kostas Lambridis and Objects of Common Interest, places materials at the centre of interest, interpreting them as a repository of memory and a narrative device. From here we observe the fractures of the present: Reclaiming Design: Technology, Environment, Politics, is the space where the works by Jonghoo Jeong, Maximilian Marchesani and Moon Seop Seo confront technological acceleration, the environmental crisis and inequalities. Finally, Ritual and Symbolism: New Ideas of Community and Agency goes beyond the object to arrive at design as social practice, made up of gestures, rituals and sharing. There are two new commissions: by Lucas Muñoz Muñoz and VESSEL (James Bridle and Navine G. Dossos). The only question that remains in the background: What does it mean to design today?

Where: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (Minnesota, Usa)
When: From 17/10/26 to 14/02/2027

Costantino Nivola. Scolpire il vento, Milan

Curated by Cecilia Alemani with an exhibition design by Alessandro Floris, Costantino Nivola. Scolpire il vento brings over 200 works by one of the most beloved representatives of transatlantic modernism on the international scene to the Triennale di Milano. A devotee of the dialogue between the arts, in 1939 Nivola fled fascist Italy for New York, where he found the freedom and space to reinvent his expression, rooted in the encounter between the archaic memory of the Mediterranean and the energy of the American metropolis. This is an affinity whose profound significance is fully grasped by the curatorship of Cecilia Alemani, an Italian who has chosen New York as the place of her training and work. The layout traverses sculpture, architecture, design and graphics, following the idea of an art capable of belonging to the community and inhabiting public space. They range from Nivola’s early graphic works for Olivetti to his revolutionary sand-casting technique developed in New York and his large anthropomorphic sculptures. Sand, concrete and metal thus became the tools of an artist capable of transforming the experience of exile and the encounter with modernity into a profoundly humanist idea of art: a bridge between the individual, community and space.

Where: Triennale Milano
When: From 11/11/26 to 14/02/27

Selma Selman 1000 Tears, Bergamo

Born in 1991, Selma Selman hails originally from Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina: her research is built on her own skin, starting from the history of her family and the Roma community to which she belongs. One of the most incisive voices on the international scene, the artist transforms memory, trauma and identity into tools of resistance and self-determination: 1000 Tears is a project that restores in its most intimate and radical form a research in which personal experience, family memory and collective history become artistic material. At the centre of the exhibition space is a new excerpt from Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024), a film stemming from an episode experienced by Selman in 1994 when, during a ceasefire, her mother with her daughters crossed the Bihać Bridge, known as the Blue Bridge, covered at the time with corpses and dog carcasses: to protect her daughter from that vision, the mother tried to cover her eyes with one hand, while with the other she held their newly purchased provisions. The wind that kept blowing her hair across her face, preventing her from seeing, helped transform that crossing into an experience suspended between perception and bewilderment. Recalling the scene thirty years later means having the strength today to share a past overcast with shadows, and restoring the strength of the political gesture in the exhibition. Keeping memory alive is a form of resistance to oblivion that never ceases to question the conscience.

Where: GAMeC, Spazio Zero (BG)
When: From 01/10/26 to 24/01/27

Selma Selman 1000 Tears - Ph. Vanesa Miteva

In Practice – as opposed to ‘in theory’, Timisoara (Romania)

Why is the sixth edition of the Beta-Timișoara Architecture Biennial, curated by architects Andreas Kofler and Tudor Vlăsceanu, important? Not only because of the more than 40 projects from 15 countries, but because of the way it rethinks the role of architecture at this latitude: no longer as a finished object, but as a process of experimentation, negotiation and invention. In a Romania that still bears the traces of the long period of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime and the far-reaching changes that followed its fall, Beta looks at what remains not as an unchanging legacy, but as material from which to start again, questioning the relations between memory, urban change and new forms of living. Located next to the Botanic Garden, the former Ion Mincu School becomes an exhibition space and laboratory: projects, prototypes, installations, films, research and reuse projects test new possibilities for a building marked by time. Damaged windows are reinterpreted, new connections between the interiors are opened, materials from demolition are recovered, rainwater is collected, and spaces for coexistence are introduced. Not a single vision, but a cluster of hypotheses testing what a place can still become. Among the protagonists are Rotor, Bêka & Lemoine and HouseEurope!, together with a generation of young European designers and collectives, as witnesses to a more open and collaborative way of creating architecture, attentive to the social responsibility of design. A possible nouvelle vague that seeks to cultivate the new within the traces of the past and to transform Beta, beyond the duration of the Biennale, into an urban laboratory capable of questioning what a city can become when it decides to come to terms with what it has inherited.

Where: Ion Mincu High, Timisoara (Romania)
When: Until 25 October

Biba: Function. Context. Idea., Ljubljana

According to Biba Bertok, a Slovenian industrial designer born in 1941, there are two ways of practising the profession: imagining new visions of the future or placing industrial production in the service of everyday life. Bertok belonged to the second group, that of ‘diligent designers’, committed to raising the quality of a project at every level, from the domestic dimension to the production system, all the way to the functional performance of objects. Although she was forced to reckon with the slowness of the system of production of furniture and the resistance of companies and clients, more attentive to the logic of the market than to innovation, she remained faithful to the principle of good design: to infuse humanity into life in the modern concrete cells of Slovenian dormitory cities. She achieved this through colour, fabrics and multifunctional furnishings capable of adapting to users, spaces and different budgets.
Curated by Barbara Predan and Špela Šubic, the exhibition is the first comprehensive survey devoted to a pioneer of systemic design applied to furniture, who contributed decisively to the development of Slovenian furniture systems. It is an invitation to reinterpret her legacy in the light of the historical setting and the role of women in the furniture industry and design. An exhibition itinerary that spans Slovenia’s socialist past and the future of research into design. So it is no coincidence that Martina Muzi is curating the 29th Design Biennial (BIO 29). From November 2026 to April 2027, Soft Fields will study how knowledge confined to research and the design’industry can be made accessible, redirected, and redistributed through design.

Where: Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana
When: Until 08/11/26

Knowledge Takes Form, Doha

Doha is preparing to redraw the boundaries of Middle Eastern culture through a major double opening of international significance. Qatar Museums’ autumn season will see the closely timed debut of two outstanding exhibitions: the Design Doha biennial and the Rubaiya Qatar contemporary art quadrennial (from 21/11/26 to 30/04/27). Both events choose not to be isolated within an aesthetic bubble, but rather to engage with the region’s complex context of conflicts to offer concrete responses to the geopolitical crisis. Led by director Fahad Al Obaidly and artistic director Glenn Adamson, the Design Doha Biennial, under the umbrella of Knowledge Takes Form, will show how the design of the MENASA area is not pure decoration, but an archive of historical and craft knowledge handed down from generation to generation. As a testament to the event's international prestige, Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile, will serve on the jury. Here, knowledge materialises in sustainable projects to respond to environmental emergencies and post-conflict reconstruction, translating knowledge into concrete infrastructures through 16 different disciplines. At the same time, the four-yearly Rubaiya Qatar will make its debut in the spaces of ALRIWAQ, Mathaf and Katara with the central exhibition Unruly Waters. The curatorial project will exploit the metaphor of water to politically analyse forced migrations and the scarcity of resources linked to wars. Acting as an ideal link, on 20 November 2026, the Doha Pavilion: Gerhard Richter will open in MIA Park as a permanent hexagonal space designed in collaboration with Selldorf Architects. The simultaneous presence of these events will offer a privileged vantage point to verify in the field the pragmatic effectiveness of design and the critical impact of contemporary art.

Where: Design Doha Biennial 2026
When: November 5-7, 2026

Allo Sbagliato, Milan

The historic Milanese tradition of clubs in the style of Cochi & Renato and Jannacci and of clans like Celentano’s is about to be revived in a new guise. Marco Mengoni, with the format of a pop-up venue, will evoke the intimate atmospheres of the 1970s. His Allo Sbagliato is not an exclusive club, but a 500-seat container open to encounters between the arts, a residency, a contemporary and essentially Milanese caravanserai where the singer-songwriter is promoting a new idea of musical patronage. The project unites different worlds. If design enthusiasts will appreciate the furnishings by Kartell, Porro, Davide Groppi and Ingo Maurer, whose participation was facilitated by the Salone del Mobile, fans will be able to choose from 26 live evenings when the artist will be performing with his band directly in the midst of the audience, eliminating any physical barrier. Under the creative direction of Mengoni himself, the program will range across live music, stand-up comedy, DJ sets and contemporary art performances. Outstanding among the guests are the names of Benjamin Clementine, Mace, Sayf, Faccianuvola and Rareş, who will join comedians such as Luca Ravenna and the duo Nuzzo and Di Biase, while Sabrina Rosenheim and Carla Giaccio Darias will conduct the first artistic incursions. “This time I want to do it SBAGLIATO (WRONG),” said the singer at the press conference. The club refuses to keep to fixed categories, and will change its skin every night. Sealing the authenticity of the experience is a single shared rule: patrons will have to leave their phones at the entrance. Allo Sbagliato is strictly an off-line club where the audience is again the active protagonist of a collective performance. Indulging in distractions would be just plain wrong.

Where: Milan Via Privata S. Mansueto 1
When: from 5/11/26 to 19/12/26

Es Devlin: Other Worlds, London

From Venice to London. With Es Devlin: Other Worlds, the British artist from Homo Faber flies to the Design Museum to inaugurate her first European retrospective. The exhibition celebrates thirty years of monumental visions, including stages for music icons and rotating kinetic installations, and goes beyond traditional exhibition boundaries to include works, videos and her largest archive ever exhibited. At the centre of the story is 30-Year Desk, a monumental circular table that brings together scale models of her most famous works: from the stage sets for The Lehman Trilogy to the London 2012 Olympics, all the way to the Super Bowl 2022 and the scenery for the biggest world tours. The itinerary is completed by the ecological sanctuary Come Home Again and the installation An Infinite Library, whose books (by Penguin) will be donated to charity for the National Year of Reading 2026. A unique opportunity to decode a mind that transforms space into pure emotion.

Where: London Design Museum
When: from 02/10/26 to 04/04/27

Reification of Value, Milan

What if it were thought – even before words – that became matter? It is from this question that Maurice Benayo’s project takes shape: a narrative that weaves together neuroscience, art and blockchain to transform human ideas and values (from love to freedom, from compassion to solidarity) into visible and tangible forms. At the heart of the exhibition, in the Immersive Room of the Centre for Digital Culture at Porta Venezia in Milan, lies the Neuro-design Factory: a space where visitors become creators by wearing an EEG headset. The process is simple: the device detects brain activity and translates it into a three-dimensional form, which is then returned to its creator and recorded as an NFT on the blockchain. The digital works then converge in the Value Trading Room – a sort of stock exchange – where they are catalogued in the Periodic Table of Values and finally analysed by artificial intelligence. From here, the project extends to the thousands of minds involved since 2018, which converge in Fusion VoV to give life to a single, great collective work. And to invite us to reflect: is what we consider valuable today truly so?

Where: MEET Digital Culture Center, Milan
When: from 29/10/26 to 31/01/27

Lina Bo Bardi. The Poetics of Survival, Shanghai

Curated by Renato Anelli with an exhibition design by OPEN Architecture and laid out over 2,000 square meters of the former Huangpu power plant, the exhibition explores the work of the Italian-Brazilian designer through over 300 archival pieces, including 33 autograph drawings and historical furnishings such as the iconic Bowl Chair. The exhibition reveals that architecture and design were not simple aesthetic exercises for Lina Bo Bardi, but concrete resources to help communities overcome historical traumas and economic crises. The exhibition, unfolding as an itinerary marked out by raw linen curtains, is designed to offer the visitor an experience with a strong sensory impact. In the hall of the museum, the swimming pool of SESC Pompéia, the cultural, social and sports centre inaugurated in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1982, has been reconstructed to full scale, a project that is open to sharing by the public. Lina Bo Bardi: The Poetics of Survival thus marks a historic turning point for the institution. For the first time the prestigious Architecture & City exhibition program is dedicated wholly to a female designer.

Where: Power Station of Art, Shanghai
When: until 25/10/26