London Design Biennale names Het Nieuwe Instituut as curator for 2023

The London Design Biennale has appointed Dutch national design and architecture museum HNI (Het Nieuwe Instituut) as artistic director for its 2023 edition.

Every other year the London Design Biennale invites design delegations from around the world to a Somerset House takeover, where the global role of design is explored.

The HNI’s artistic and general director Aric Chen will lead the curation and development of the event, which sees national and territorial pavilions from around the world respond to a theme. Chen has chosen “remapping collaborations”.

“Globalisation is transforming”

“Growing global complexity” is the inspiration behind the theme and countries, territories and cities will be invited to interpret this as they see it.

Chen says, “The era of globalisation as we’ve known it is transforming into a new condition that we can’t yet define.

“What we know for sure, however, is that in confronting our ever-growing planetary challenges, working together is more critical than ever and we hope that this biennale can act as a testing ground for examining possibilities for doing so.”

International collaboration

In keeping with the main theme the Het Nieuwe Instituut will be launching a process which helps participants define and form new types of collaborations. Organisers say they will reveal more details on this in May 2022.

As the Netherlands’ national museum, the Het Nieuwe Instituut, based in Rotterdam represents design, architecture and digital culture through exhibitions, public programmes, research and national initiatives.

This is the first London Design Biennale to be curated by an institution. It follows the 2021 edition when Es Devlin took the reins as artistic director, installing Forest for Change – a forest of 400 trees in the Somerset House court yard – as she encouraged designers to tackle the theme of Resonance.

The London Design Biennale 2023 will take place 1-25 June 2023 at Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1RA