Mona Hatoum: Over, Under and In Between
A triad of installations reimagining borders and stability within the industrial verticality of Milan's most iconic former distillery.
Image credit
Mona Hatoum, Map (red), 2026. 25 mm clear red glass balls, dimensions variable. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milan.
Meet the artist
The Movement
Art Installation, Immersive InstallationsArtLovers Tip
Visit during the late afternoon when the sunlight filters through the Cisterna’s windows, casting moving shadows of the metal grids across the floor and making the red glass spheres of the world map glow with an internal fire.
Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see
Mona Hatoum has spent four decades translating the heavy weight of displacement and territory into the fragile languages of glass and steel. Born in Beirut and based in London, her work often peels back the skin of the familiar to reveal the vulnerability underneath. In this exhibition at Fondazione Prada, she utilizes the soaring, vertical silos of the Cisterna to house three monumental installations that question the permanence of the maps and grids we use to organize our world.
You're watching the slow, rhythmic breath of a metal grid that buckles and recomposes itself, filling the concrete chamber with the haunting sounds of creaking steel. High above, a net of hand-blown glass spheres catches the shifting Milanese light like dew on a spider's web, while on the floor below, a borderless world made of thousands of tiny red glass marbles offers a fragile, shimmering vision of a planet without divisions.
Worth the trip
- Architectural Dialogue: The exhibition is staged inside the Cisterna, a series of vertical storage tanks that amplify the height and industrial gravity of Hatoum's works.
- Rare Materiality: Seeing Map (red) in person reveals the tactile tension of thousands of glass marbles held together only by their own placement on the gallery floor.
- Kinetic Drama: The installation all of a quiver provides a rare opportunity to witness a massive architectural grid that moves, groans, and collapses with human-like instability.
How to experience it
Begin by looking up into the glass constellations of Web before lowering your gaze to the floor-bound continents of Map (red), allowing your body to adjust to the shifting scales of the space. Move slowly through the vertical chambers, listening for the mechanical sighs of the moving structures. Afterward, walk through the Largo Isarco neighborhood surrounding the foundation to see how the rigid urban grid of Milan contrasts with the fluid, borderless worlds Hatoum creates inside the distillery.
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