Promotion: Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Norman Foster, academics Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, artist Theaster Gates and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist are set to take part in the 24th edition of Triennale Milano International Exhibition.
Set to open on 13 May, the 24th edition of Triennale Milano International Exhibition will explore the theme of Inequalities.
“We are born unequal – all of us,” said Milan Triennale president Stefano Boeri. “Not only because of the genes we inherit, but because of our families, our surroundings, the particular corner of the world in which we are born. From the very beginning, we are shaped by differences and marked by inequality.”
“Sometimes they present themselves as opportunities, other times as constraints,” he continued. “They may serve as resources, as foundations of identity that evolve over time, or as chains that hold us back, bonds from which we must struggle to break free.”
The International Exhibition, which follows the Unknown Unknowns edition in 2022 and Broken Nature in 2019, will bring together artists, architects, museums, and research institutes from about 45 countries.
It will include projects by leading architects Kazuyo Sejima, Alejandro Aravena, Elizabeth Diller and Boonserm Premthada.
“A series of exhibitions will explore how immense wealth is now concentrated in the hands of a few – and how, for millions around the world, being born into poverty has become an irreversible fate,” said Boeri.
“We will explore how inequality – whether inherited at birth, encountered along the way, or shaped by our own actions – impacts life expectancy and health for each of us.”
Occupying the historic Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan, which has hosted the International Exhibition since 1933, the exhibitions and pavilions will be spread across two floors.
The ground floor of the building will focus on geopolitics of inequalities, with the majority of exhibitions concerned with cities.
“The cities of the world are in fact the place where the challenges of reducing global warming and overcoming inequalities intersect,” explained Boeri. “They are the place where the challenge of the coming decades will be won or lost.”
“Without the leadership of the cities, without their coordinated action, if they cannot meet the great challenge of reducing and containing inequalities of income, social class and education and cannot reduce disparities in access to services, information and data, any policy of an ecological transition is doomed to failure,” he continued.
Highlights will include the thematic exhibition Cities curated by Nina Bassoli, which aims to raise “questions about the new dialectic between wealth and poverty, society and community, ecologies and cities and the surprising forms in which they manifest in urban settings today”.
It will include an installation focused on the Grenfell Tower fire, promoted by Grenfell Next of Kin.
Also on the ground floor, Towards an Equal Future by the Norman Foster Foundation will focus on the housing crisis in emergency contexts. The exhibition will include a pair of 1:1 scale prototypes of emergency housing shelters.
The main staircase leading up to the first floor, where the International Exhibition continues, will contain an installation by Filippo Teoldi.
Named 471 Days, the piece aims to transform data from the war in Gaza into a visual experience “to explore war, one of the most dramatic manifestations of inequality”.
On the first floor, the exhibitions will be focused on biopolitics of inequalities.
“The first floor of the Palazzo dell’Arte is devoted to the biopolitical implications of social, economic and gender inequalities, in particular on habits, styles and life expectancies in contemporary societies, beginning with a look at the biodiversity of and in social bodies,” said Boeri.
“The biopolitics of inequalities sheds light on the immense differences in the possibility over the course of a lifetime to access resources that were not available in the original conditions.”
This space will include a special project curated by artist Gates. Named A Clay Corpus, the project aims to “tackle inequalities from the standpoint of lost and found craftsmanship”.
It will transform the space of Ettore Sottsass’s Casa Lana into a research facility dedicated to a vast collection of Japanese ceramics from the town of Tokoname, known for its ancient pottery traditions.
Also on this floor, the exhibition We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture by Colomina and Wigley will explore the intersection of bacteria and buildings.
According to the curators, health is closely tied to inequality. The reduction in microbial diversity over the past century is reportedly among the causes of many modern diseases, while bacteria are increasingly resistant to antibiotics, something that is leading to more deaths each year.
The exhibition will examine the role architecture can play in encouraging interspecies coexistence, where microbes and bacteria are seen as allies rather than enemies.
Another exhibition presented on the first floor is The Republic of Longevity – In Health Equality We Trust, curated by Nic Palmarini and Marco Sammicheli, which examines how people’s life spans are directly connected to their access to resources.
For more information, including how to purchase tickets, visit the Triennale Milano’s website.
Triennale Milano International Exhibition takes place from 13 May to 9 November 2025 at Triennale Milano, Viale Emilio Alemagna, 6, 20121 Milano, Italy. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.
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