Step Inside the Surreal ‘Satellites’ Exhibition at Prada Tokyo

Tokyo’s Prada Aoyama, a glass-clad prism designed by Herzog & de Meuron, has always been a temple of avant-garde expression. But this spring, it becomes something stranger—a portal. From April 18 to August 25, the fifth floor morphs into a 1950s apartment, frozen in amber yet pulsing with something uncanny. This is Satellites, an exhibition where Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Neon Demon) and Japanese game visionary Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid, Death Stranding) dissolve the walls between film, gaming, and pure sensory hallucination.

A Living Memory Box

The space feels like a film set—or a crime scene. A mid-century sofa, a rotary phone, a bed made but never slept in. Every object hums with nostalgia, but the air crackles with distortion. Six televisions, their casings peeled open like mechanized fruit, reveal tangled veins of wires and circuitry. On their screens, Refn and Kojima flicker in and out of focus, their voices overlapping—one in English, the other in Japanese. They speak of creativity, of distance, of the invisible threads between minds.

In this dialogue, the artists, who’ve collaborated for over a decade, treat language as a game of telephone—words warped, meanings blurred. Visitors stand between the screens, caught in the crossfire of their exchange. The effect is hypnotic: two storytellers, masters of tension, weaving an interstellar conversation.

The Cassette Room:

In the adjacent dressing room, the exhibition mutates. A cassette player sits atop a tower of tapes, each a remixed version of Refn and Kojima’s dialogue—translated, distorted, and reassembled by AI. Here, visitors become editors, splicing together their own version of the conversation. Italian, Mandarin, French—the more languages layered, the stranger the narrative grows. It’s a metaphor for collaboration itself: messy, nonlinear, alive.

Why “Satellites”?

The title is no accident. Satellites orbit, separate yet bound by gravity. Refn and Kojima, though oceans apart, operate the same way—drawn together by shared obsessions. For Refn, it’s the neon-soaked tension of human connection; for Kojima, the way games collapse borders between players. Both are fixated on how technology distorts (or deepens) communication.

Satellites become their work. The apartment is a character. The TVs aren’t screens; they’re relics. Even the cassettes, with their lo-fi hiss, feel like artifacts from a future that never was.

Prada’s Playground for the Unclassifiable

Fondazione Prada, the cultural arm of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli’s empire, has always thrived on collisions—art meets film meets architecture. Satellites fits perfectly: a project so hybrid it defies category. It’s not a game, not a film, not an installation—it’s a vibe. A mood board brought to life.

And that’s the point. In an era of algorithmic feeds and sterile digital experiences, Satellites insists on texture, on imperfection, on the warmth of human interference. It asks: What happens when two obsessive minds sync up? The answer isn’t in the words. It’s in the static between them.

Satellites Exhibition , Prada Aoyama Tokyo