OMA completes ‘multi-dimensional’ exhibition design for Dior in Japan

OMA has completed their third exhibition design collaboration with Dior, following the opening of the Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams exhibition in Japan. Located within the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the OMA-designed scenography will be on view to the public until May 28, 2023.

The exhibition presents 70 years of history and relations between Dior and Japan, with a scenography and curation that “pays homage to Japanese culture and tradition.” Responding to the museum’s linear pathway of galleries, the exhibition creates a series of distinct spaces alternating between light and dark, expansive and intimate, to take visitors on a “multi-dimensional journey of discovery.”

“The fashion exhibition is a domain that requires architecture to become a narrative medium,” said Shohei Shigematsu, a partner at OMA. “We wanted to expand and diversify potentials for storytelling through a retrospective that not only looks back at history but brings new life and relevance to today’s culture.”

Each space in the exhibition seeks to showcase shared elements between Japanese tradition and culture, and Dior’s history and contemporary collections; elements including construction techniques and visual or spatial manipulations. Throughout the exhibition, surfaces host dynamic projects and graphics, as well as art pieces by Japanese artist Ayumi Shibata and photographer Yuriko Takagi.

“The scenography is a series of distinct set designs for diverse curatorial themes,” Shigematsu explained. “The starting point for each set was a common ground shared by Dior and Japan such as a mode of craft or material expression. By translating and manipulating that shared element into architectural forms and contemporary shapes, we provide a new set of surfaces for storytelling that feels surprising and tectonic, yet grounded in the inventive and disciplined beauty we found to be authentic to both the House of Dior and Japanese culture.”

News of the exhibition comes in the same month that OMA completed their stepped Greenpoint Landing towers in Brooklyn, and one month after it was announced that OMA and Cooper Robertson’s Buffalo AKG Museum restoration will open in May 2023. In September, OMA was selected to design the University of Illinois’ new DPI innovation hub, while in August, their long-awaited Taipei Performing Arts Center officially opened in Taiwan.