At Prada Aoyama, the fifth floor has become something between a memory, a film set, and a glitching dream you are not entirely supposed to understand.
The house’s new project, “Satellites”, brings together Japanese game auteur Hideo Kojima and Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn in an installation that feels less like an exhibition and more like stepping inside the nervous system of two obsessive image-makers. Presented in Tokyo with the support of Fondazione Prada, the show turns the building into a strange domestic interior: part mid-century apartment, part cinematic waiting room, part transmission from another dimension.
Across six retro-futuristic televisions, suspended images of Kojima and Refn appear in conversation. They talk around the things that have always haunted both of their work: friendship, technology, identity, communication, death, and what remains after someone is gone. It is a fitting pairing. Kojima has spent decades pulling video games towards cinema, emotion, and impossible architectures of connection, while Refn has built a film language out of neon, violence, silence, and psychological atmosphere.
The title, “Satellites”, gives the project its emotional structure. These are two creators orbiting each other, close but never collapsed into one identity. Their distance becomes the point. In the installation, the conversation is not simply something to watch, but something to piece together. Nearby, a cassette player and stacks of tapes offer fragments of their dialogue, mixed with sound bites, soundtrack textures, and AI-translated versions in different languages. Visitors assemble their own route through the material, like tuning into half-lost signals from parallel realities.
There is something very Prada about the whole gesture: fashion as a cultural operating system, not just a clothing label. Instead of staging another clean luxury spectacle, the house creates a space where cinema, gaming, artificial intelligence, and human connection blur into one soft, uncanny frequency.
At a moment when films and video games increasingly borrow each other’s tools, myths, and emotional codes, Kojima and Refn feel less like collaborators than emissaries from the future of image-making. “Satellites” does not try to explain that future neatly. It lets it flicker in the room.
“Satellites” is on view at Prada Aoyama, Tokyo, from April 18 to August 25, 2025.
Photos: Prada