FUNGI

Fungi – better known as moulds or mushrooms – satisfy many human needs. We have long eaten mushrooms, for example, and used penicillin to fight bacteria. Today, fungi are being embraced as a new, on-trend material in the worlds of design and architecture. Providing a counterbalance to this human-centred approach is FUNGI: Anarchist Designers. This exhibition, curated by anthropologist Anna Tsing and architect and artist Feifei Zhou, presents fungi as independent organisms that thrive in unique, multi-species environments and in the ruins of capitalism.

Tsing and Zhou instead preferto describe FUNGI: Anarchist Designers as an exhibition of ‘antidesign’. In this show, fungi are not passive building materials, but rather anarchic co-designers – unconscious and uncontrollable – of a world that can only exist through alliances between humans and other living things. The exhibition reveals how fungi manifest themselves at different scales, from sick frogs and the dishwasher in your kitchen,to hospital beds,termite mounds, the human digestive system, coffee, banana and conifer plantations, and the jungle.

Many of the artworks in this exhibition were created specifically for FUNGI. Forthis exhibition, artists have collaborated with anthropologists, infectious disease specialists, ecologists and amphibian experts in orderto reinterpret their research and translate it into installations.

In addition to these installations, you will see five collaborations between artists and scientists, three individual commissioned artworks, 11 loans, five manifestos, a poem, and a tree stump in the New Garden. And, of course,there will be plenty of fungi! The exhibition also includes examples of archival documents that have been altered – or ‘redesigned’ – by fungi. For a heritage institution, fungi pose a constant potential threat. But could the controlled and well-documented ‘decay’ of historical drawings or photographs one day be a possibility?

Opening: November 20, 2025, 7:30 p.m.

Speakers: Anna Tsing, Feifei Zhou