In the evocative dimness of the Cisterna, Mona Hatoum unfolds a trilogy of works that turn the industrial space reclaimed by OMA's project into a pulsating organism, where glass becomes the skin of the world and metal records its tremors. Conceived as a site-specific intervention designed exclusively for the Foundation's Milanese premises, Over, Under and in Between takes shape as a rigorous meditation — at once poetic and political — on the condition of suspension that runs through our present.
My work speaks of exile, uprootedness, disorientation and an enormous sense of loss, a consequence of the separations brought about by war. — Mona Hatoum
The Palestinian-born artist, born in Beirut and for decades an unquestioned protagonist of the international scene, returns to question her recurring themes — denied belonging, displacement, the asymmetry of power — by drawing on three formal archetypes that run across her entire practice: the web, the map and the grid. In the first room, visitors are welcomed by Web, a suspended constellation of transparent, hand-blown spheres held together by slender steel threads that trace an airborne canvas. The lightness of the glass dialogues with the tension of the structure, producing a fragile architecture that sways imperceptibly as spectators pass by: a cosmic cobweb in which the constellations seem to have become entangled, yet also a trap, a network of connections and at the same time of control.
The heart of the exhibition pulses in the central room with Map. On the raw concrete floor, more than thirty thousand translucent red glass marbles compose the outlines of the continents. Hatoum's cartographic choice is anything but neutral: the artist sets aside the familiar Mercator projection — the one that for centuries inflated the dimensions of Europe and the Global North — to adopt the more equitable Gall-Peters projection, giving back to the continental masses of the Global South, from Africa to South America to South-East Asia, the proportions that rightfully belong to them. The result is a vibrant, unstable planisphere, devoid of frame or traced borders: a single breath is enough to imagine that the spheres might roll away, shattering geography itself. It is a political gesture disguised as optical wonder, an invitation to rethink the visual hierarchies we have internalised as natural.
The experience closes with All of a Quiver, perhaps the most moving and unsettling work in the entire itinerary, a kinetic installation that betrays the apparent stillness of the first two. A metal grid resting on the ground, segmented into cubic modules, is set in motion by a motorised mechanism that slowly lifts it and lets it fall again, as if an invisible breath were trying to animate it only to abandon it once more to its own weight. The creaks and clinks that accompany each oscillation amplify the sense of a strained resistance, of a perpetual attempt at construction that never reaches completion. The structure neither fully collapses nor definitively rises: it remains in the balance, just like the human condition the artist evokes.
The very title, Over, Under and in Between, suggests the possibility of moving across different perceptual planes: one looks up at the web, one lowers the gaze onto the map, one stands suspended before the grid as it moves. Yet beyond its spatial dimension, those prepositions also describe an existential position — that of the precarious beings who inhabit the margins, of communities crushed between greater powers, of identities suspended among multiple belongings. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication with essays by Theo Deutinger, Lina Ghotmeh and Jamieson Webster, who reread the works on view through the intersecting lenses of psychoanalysis, cartography and architecture.
What Hatoum offers in Milan is not the retrospective of an established artist, but rather an exercise in distillation — a triad of works capable of condensing an entire poetics into a handful of essential elements. The overall effect is one of cutting beauty: it does not console, but rather compels us to look at the world — literally — beneath our feet.
If you make a piece of work and nobody is moved by it, then you haven't done your job properly. — Mona Hatoum
Venue: Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, 20139 Milan
Dates: 29 January – 9 November 2026
Opening hours:
- Monday: 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
- Wednesday and Thursday: 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
- Friday, Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 am – 9:00 pm
- Tuesday: closed
Online and on-site ticket offices close one hour before the venue closes. Free admission for under-18s, visitors with disabilities and, on Thursdays, for residents of the Municipality of Milan over 65 (with a valid ID).
Telephone: +39 02 5666 2611
Free parking: Largo Isarco 1 (75 parking spaces reserved for visitors)
Website: www.fondazioneprada.org
