FUNGI: Anarchist Designers to open in November at the Nieuwe InstituutFUNGI: Anarchist Designers to open in November at the Nieuwe Instituut

• On 20 November 2025, the Nieuwe Instituut - the Dutch national museum for architecture, design and digital culture - will open FUNGI: Anarchist Designers, curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and designer Feifei Zhou.

• Uniquely, this exhibition will present fungi not as on-trend new design materials, but as designers, allies and world builders in their own right, challenging capitalist and human-centred ways of thinking.

• The exhibition will focus on seven new works, specially created by scientists and artists collaborating together, which show how fungi influence, break down and recycle other organisms to create new life.

• Visitors will also see three commissioned artworks, 11 loans, five manifestos, two poems and a tree stump in the New Garden. And, of course, there will be plenty of fungi!

Nieuwe Instituut, the Dutch national museum for architecture, design and digital culture, will open FUNGI: Anarchist Designers on 20 November. This new exhibition has been curated by the anthropologist Anna Tsing, whose acclaimed book The Mushroom at the End of the World has inspired countless thinkers, makers, activists and designers, and by the designer Feifei Zhou of terriStories.

With FUNGI, an exhibition at the intersection of science, art and design, the Nieuwe Instituut is exploring the boundaries between traditional design disciplines. What can we learn from non-human life? FUNGI is therefore not your average design exhibition, but an experimental space designed to encourage us to think, live and design differently.

Fungi, better known as moulds and mushrooms, satisfy a wide range of human needs. For example, we eat mushrooms and use penicillin to fight bacteria. In design and architecture, fungi are embraced as new, on-trend materials. However, FUNGI: Anarchist Designers does not take this human-centred approach. Instead, it presents fungi as independent designers, allies and world builders that challenge the human desire to control and dominate the world.

With this approach, Zhou and Tsing are indirectly criticising the capitalist exploitation of the environment that lies behind the use of fungi in the design and production of our consumer goods. They rather describe FUNGI as an ‘anti-design’ exhibition: a form of design that is both unconscious and uncontrollable, in which fungi are not merely passive building materials, but rather the anarchist designers of a world that can only exist through alliances between humans and non-human life.

Central to FUNGI: Anarchist Designers are seven new works, created specifically for the exhibition. For this occasion, anthropologists, ecologists and biologists have collaborated with visual artists, who have reinterpreted their research and translated it into installations. The paintings, sculptures and multimedia installations - mostly interactive - take visitors on a diverse, multi-sensory journey.

In the three consecutive rooms entitled Break, Assassinate and Mobilize, visitors experience how fungi influence, break down and recycle living systems. Each room presents them in a different guise: from destroyers of civilization to connectors of species.

For example, the coffee_rust installation maps how a coffee fungus undermines agricultural monocultures; Of Boar and Fungi: A Nuclear Love Affair shows how fungi, wild boars and radioactive particles collude in a post-nuclear landscape; and yeast worlding confronts visitors with the evolutionary pact between yeast and the human digestive system.

In addition to these seven collaborations between scientists and artists, the exhibition includes three commissioned artworks, five manifestos and 11 loans, including works by Rotterdam textile artist Lizan Freijsen, Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, and Korean conceptual artist Annicka Yi, as well as two poem, one of them being Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath, which is being published in Dutch for the first time.

Archival documents from the Nieuwe Instituut’s collection have also been included and ‘redesigned’ through the presence of fungi. Finally, visitors will find an installation around a tree stump in the garden: not a dead object, but the starting point of new fungal life. In this way, FUNGI grows beyond the museum walls, quite literally.

Anna Tsing is an internationally renowned anthropologist affiliated with the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book The Mushroom at the End of the World is widely regarded as one of the most influential publications of the past decade at the intersection of ecology, critiques of capitalism, and more-than-human thinking. Designer Feifei Zhou (terriStories) works at the intersection of spatial design, ecology, and visual culture, and is renowned for her interdisciplinary interpretations of intricate scientific processes.

The overarching scenography of FUNGI is by design duo Marloes and Wikke. Jacob Hoving and Maud Vervenne are responsible for the graphic design.

FUNGI: Anarchist Designers will be on display at the Nieuwe Instituut from 21 November 2025 to 9 August 2026. This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the Cultuurfonds, the Mondriaan Fund, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Iona Foundation.

Follow the link for more information: https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/fungi-anarchistische-ontwerpers

Images
download the press kit with accompanying images here.

Press previews and interviews
Members of the press are invited to preview the exhibition in the days leading up to the opening on Thursday 20 November. Curators Anna Tsing and Feifei Zhou are also available for interviews. Please contact us to schedule an appointment.

Contact
Robin van Essel, Press Officer +31 (0)6 3803 9218, r.vanessel@nieuweinstituut.nl

The scientist-artist teams:

• Ivette Perfecto and Zachary Hajian-Forooshani with Filipp Groubnov
• Matteo Garbelotto with Kyriaki Goni
• Lee Berger and Danielle Wallace with Oscar Furbacken
• Alyssa Paredes and Maia Cruz Palileo
• Bettina Stoetzer with Åsa Sonjasdotter and Berkveldt
• Rob Dunn with Baum & Leahy
• Shiho Satsuka with Liu Yi

Other commissions:

• Phil Ayres
• Animali Domestici
• Hajime Imamura

Nieuwe Instituut is the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design and digital culture. It is located in the Museumpark in Rotterdam. Through exhibitions, events, research and other national and international initiatives, we demonstrate how design ideas can contribute positively to urgent social and ecological issues. Our goal is to envision a better future and put our ideas into practice. Nieuwe Instituut is a welcoming and vibrant space where diverse designers, thinkers and members of the public can meet. Multivocality is also the foundation of the Zoöp, our organisational model in which non-human life has a voice. Nieuwe Instituut also manages, preserves and provides access to the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, which is one of the world’s largest architectural collections, as well as Sonneveld House, a museum house and icon of Dutch functionalist architecture dating from 1933.