Cultural Exhibition
Jūshin Kaikan
Completed in 1930, Jushin Kaikan served first as an office for the Shinshū Ōtani-ha foundation and later as a dormitory for Otani University. For the Kyōto YouMe Triennale, the Cultural Exhibition fills the building floor by floor. In the basement, Project Blue traces the history of a blue that begins in the mountains of Afghanistan. On the ground floor, Harry Pearce's All Our Blood puts a question to the world in work made from the artist's own blood. On the first floor, Le Mani Pensano brings together four Italian artists on the passage of making from thought to action to language. On the second, Design As Memory, by artists from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, reconsiders design as a record of culture, alongside THE FUTURE IS HANDMADE from India, which looks to the future of work made by hand. To make is at times to answer the conditions of a society, at times to object to them, and to propose a better world. Here, in this place, we think together about drawing a future and giving it new meaning.
The Future Is Handmade - India
Design As Memory - Qatar
Le Mani Pensano (Thinking Hands) - Italy
Project Blue - Afghanistan
The Future Is Handmade
India
Curator: Esha Gupta
Coordination: DESIGN PATAKI
In India, making has always been a way of life: for centuries, textiles, objects, architecture and craft have been shaped by the human hand, carrying forward generations of knowledge and creativity. The Future Is Handmade brings together Indian practices that combine experimentation, material exploration and craftsmanship to create work that is at once deeply personal and globally relevant. Moving fluidly between art, design and technology, the exhibition envisions a future defined not by speed or scale, but by intention, originality and the enduring value of human creativity.
Design As Memory
Qatar
Curator: Shaikha Al Sulaiti
Design as Memory is grounded in a design methodology that reframes every building, object and textile as an active, enduring form of cultural documentation – encoding the social conditions, technological habits and inner values of a society at a specific point in time. Through this curated exhibition, four regional artists and designers translate inherited heritage, architectural motifs and localised stories into contemporary, immersive design. From hand-woven pixel textiles to geometry-driven collectible objects, their work ensures that the region's cultural soul is intentionally recorded and preserved for generations to come.
Le Mani Pensano (Thinking Hands)
Italy
Curator: Maria Vittoria Baravelli
Coordination: De-Tales
Thinking hands. Italy between gesture, matter, nature and memory presents four voices of contemporary Italian art. The exhibition brings different works and processes into dialogue, in which gesture- meticulous or spontaneous, repeated or sudden – becomes a tool for transforming thought into form. Through practices that demand concentration and presence, the artists explore making as a space of relationship between matter, nature and memory: not merely the production of objects, but a way of entering into contact with what precedes and runs through human experience. Gesture thus takes on an almost ritual dimension, in which thought translates into action and action becomes language.
All Our Blood
UK
Artist: Harry Pearce
Music: Peter Gabriel
Film: Richard Foster
Exhibition Design: Pentagram
“This installation is made of my blood. Blood is vital to us all. What is done to one, in the end is done to us all. We are all infinitely interconnected.”
Harry Pearce
Project Blue
Afghanistan
Photographer: Simon Buxton
Sponsor: Giardino dei Numeri
CEO: Helene Fuchs
Co-Founder: Bella Pollen
Field Operations: Ben Timberlake
Coordination: Andrea Petochi
Project Blue uses the power of art to fund heritage projects in Afghanistan. The first true blue – ultramarine – was discovered in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, mined from lapislazuli, and carried through history by Sumerians, Egyptians, and Renaissance painters. Photographer Simon Buxton travelled with Project Blue to the remote lapis mine in the high mountains of Badakhshan in September 2025. A selection of his photographs will be shown at YouMe.
