{"id":261483,"date":"2026-06-10T03:31:31","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T03:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/261483\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T03:31:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T03:31:31","slug":"static-and-signal-prada-mode-tunes-in-at-the-hotel-chelsea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/261483\/","title":{"rendered":"Static and Signal: Prada Mode Tunes in at the Hotel Chelsea"},"content":{"rendered":"

For its 14th iteration, Prada\u2019s itinerant private club takes over a New York landmark with Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima<\/p>\n

\"TwoCourtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

Most brand programming asks you to stand still and look. Prada Mode<\/a> asks you to move through something. For three days at the Hotel Chelsea<\/a>, the company\u2019s itinerant private club turned one of New York<\/a>\u2018s most storied buildings into a working broadcast, a sci-fi set and an argument about what it means to make anything at all. The 14th edition is called Satellites II, and it played less like an exhibition and more like a signal\u2014one you can tune into and walk through.<\/p>\n

The collaborators are Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn<\/a> and Japanese video game creator Hideo Kojima<\/a>, two men whose friendship has become its own medium. Satellites II extends Satellites, the show they staged at Prada Aoyama Tokyo<\/a> in the summer of 2025, which used their dialogue to trace the lines between love, language and creativity. The New York chapter widens that frame\u2014across cultures, across media, across a city\u2014and threads it through the romantic mythology of the Chelsea itself. The result is not a tribute to either artist. It is a study of the space between them.<\/p>\n

\"HideoHideo Kojima, Abel Ferrara, Nicolas Winding Refn, Courtesy of Prada New York<\/p>\n

A Club That Keeps Moving<\/p>\n

Prada Mode<\/a> began at Art Basel Miami Beach<\/a> in 2018, conceived as a members\u2019 club that refuses to stay put. Each edition lands in a different city, timed to a cultural moment like an art fair or festival, and hands its concept to a different collaborator. The first was Theaster Gates<\/a>, who built a club around Black music and identity inside the fair. Since then the program has touched down in Hong Kong<\/a> and London<\/a>, Paris<\/a> and Shanghai<\/a>, Moscow<\/a> and Los Angeles<\/a>, Dubai<\/a>, Tokyo<\/a>, Seoul<\/a>, and most recently across Osaka and Inujima Island in Japan<\/a>. The collaborator list reads like a syllabus: Damien Hirst<\/a>, Ava DuVernay<\/a>, Martine Syms<\/a>, Kazuyo Sejima<\/a>, Kate Crawford<\/a> and Trevor Paglen<\/a>, Jia Zhangke<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What holds the editions together is not a look but a posture. Prada Mode treats hospitality as a form: workshops and panels by day, performances and dinners by night, a membership granted entry to all of it. New York\u2019s edition is the first time the club has set itself inside a building with this much of its own history and Satellites II leans into that tension rather than smoothing it over.<\/p>\n

Satellites, Continued<\/p>\n

Refn and Kojima are an unlikely pair only on paper. One makes neon-soaked, slow-burning films, the other builds games that play like cinema you can walk inside. Both work in worlds defined by mood, dread and the long pause. Satellites took their friendship as its premise: the idea that creativity is relational, that it moves between people the way a signal moves between two points in orbit. Satellites II keeps the metaphor and lets it travel. The exhibition spans languages, cultures and spaces, built around the two artists\u2019 ongoing exchange of images, ideas and obsessions.<\/p>\n

\"SophieSophie Thatcher, Courtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

On the opening day, that exchange went public in the form of conversation. Two talks set the register: \u201cArrogance of Youth,\u201d with actress and musician Sophie Thatcher<\/a> joining Refn and Kojima, and \u201cArtists We Love,\u201d with filmmaker Abel Ferrara<\/a>. The dialogues circled a single, durable idea on the need to create, and the failure built into the act of creating. Not failure as a setback, but failure as the cost of admission.<\/p>\n

The Hotel as Instrument<\/p>\n

The staging uses the Chelsea as more than a backdrop. Satellites II unfolds across the building\u2019s layered architecture, moving between the lobby, corridors and guest rooms, letting the progression do the thematic work. A classical-but-progressive science-fiction aesthetic reimagines the historic setting, so the place feels at once like itself and a transmission of itself.<\/p>\n

\"ACourtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

During the private program, select guest rooms functioned as micro television studios, staging original performances for invited participants. Later, those same rooms reopened to the public as deliberate installations, the studio becoming the artifact. The space is not a container for the art. The space is the art, caught mid-broadcast.<\/p>\n

Tune In: The Prada Mode Channel<\/p>\n

The Prada Mode Channel is a broadcast built in the vein of a cable station, made in collaboration with Mikael Bertelsen<\/a>, and you can watch it from anywhere. It leaned hard into analogue television tropes\u2014talk shows, horoscopes, the low-grade intimacy of programming that runs whether or not anyone is watching. It is nostalgia used as a tool, not a mood. The channel turned the exhibition into something with a frequency, a way of reaching past the velvet rope of a members\u2019 club and into the ambient static of a screen.<\/p>\n

\"ThreeThe Velveteers, Courtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

That instinct ran through the opening night and its lineup. The Velveteers<\/a> played; Lydia Lunch<\/a> performed as singer, poet, and writer; Precious took the stage alongside a DJ set from William Benton<\/a>; KROM<\/a> ran a kendama workshop and the Nordic bakery Juno ran another. The night ended downtown at Katz\u2019s Delicatessen<\/a>, where Grandmaster Flash<\/a>, Justin Strauss<\/a> and Papi Juice<\/a> turned a hundred-year-old deli into a dance floor. The throughline is range\u2014high and low, analogue and live, all of it treated as equal input.<\/p>\n

\"GrandmasterGrandmaster Flash, Courtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

When the Doors Open<\/p>\n

Satellites II ran as a private members\u2019 program on 3-4 June, then opened to the public from 5-7 June, 2026, at the Hotel Chelsea. The timing was deliberate, coinciding with the Tribeca Festival<\/a>, planting itself in the middle of the city\u2019s early-summer cultural rush.<\/p>\n

\"ACourtesy of Prada Mode New York<\/p>\n

The public days did not shrink the project; they expanded it. The rooms that served as television studios reopened as installations and the footprint spread beyond the hotel into the city. Site-specific works extended downtown to the Prada Broadway Epicenter<\/a> and Katz\u2019s, and Refn and Kojima curated a Japanese anime festival screening at the Angelika Film Center<\/a>. A live program of talks, concerts, screenings, performances and reinterpreted broadcast formats ran alongside the exhibition, with curated dining woven through. The members\u2019 club became, for three days, a public one.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an argument underneath all of it. Prada Mode is built on access\u2014who gets in and when\u2014and Satellites II spent its first two days as a closed signal before broadcasting wide. The Hotel Chelsea, a building that has always traded on the romance of the people who passed through it, is the right place to make that point. A satellite is only useful once it sends something back down. For three public days in June, this one did.<\/p>\n

Static and Signal: Prada Mode Tunes in at the Hotel Chelsea<\/p>\n

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