This summer at Fondazione Prada

Fondazione Prada presents an extensive summer programme across its venues in Milan and Venice, bringing together contemporary art, cinema, and new technologies. At its main Milan venue, visitors can experience Cao Fei's Dash alongside Mona Hatoum's Over, under and in between, while Hito Steyerl's The Island continues at Osservatorio. In Venice, Ca' Corner della Regina hosts Helter Skelter, an exhibition bringing together Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince throughout the Biennale. The summer programme is complemented by Cinema Godard's film screenings and talks

Changing landscapes of smart agriculture

Dash

Cao Fei

9 April - 28 September 2026

Fondazione Prada, Milan

Dash, Exhibition view

Cao Fei's Dash, on view in the Podium building at Fondazione Prada's Milan venue, is shaped by the artist's research conducted over the past three years across China and Southeast Asia. Bringing together photography, video, virtual reality, documentary footage, and archival materials, the exhibition examines how smart agriculture technologies are transforming rural life. Focusing on issues such as extreme weather events caused by the climate crisis, water scarcity, and the decline of the agricultural workforce, the project also reveals the new tensions emerging alongside the promises of efficiency and food security offered by technological innovation.

One of the exhibition's points of departure is Cao Fei's encounter in 2021 with Guangzhou-based XAG, a company specialising in agricultural robotics. Through field research carried out on farms across China and Southeast Asia, the artist traces the impact of drones, artificial intelligence systems, and automation technologies on agricultural production. Rather than presenting technological development as a straightforward narrative of progress, Dash questions how algorithms reshape traditional knowledge, redefine the relationship between people and the land, and introduce new fractures into rural life.

Spanning the ground floor of the Podium, the exhibition brings together a rice granary, temple-like structures, a banana plantation, solar panels, and smart farming equipment. The newly commissioned video work Dash, together with installations such as The Birth and Dash-180c, explores the ways technology permeates everyday life and systems of belief. On the upper floor, an extensive research section draws on historical documents, scientific slides, documentaries, and interviews to examine the role of agriculture in China's modernisation. Across this multilayered presentation, Cao Fei brings together questions surrounding labour, ecology, technology, and cultural continuity.

Fragility, instability and space

Over, under and in between

Mona Hatoum

29 January - 9 November 2026

Fondazione Prada, Milan

Over, under and in between, Exhibition view

Presented in Cisterna, one of Fondazione Prada's former industrial buildings, Mona Hatoum's Over, under and in between centres on three recurring motifs that have long shaped the artist's practice: the web, the map, and the grid. Comprising three distinct installations, the exhibition reflects on the uncertainties and fragilities of the contemporary world while making the viewer's physical relationship with the space an integral part of the experience.

At the entrance, Web takes the form of a large-scale spider's web composed of hand-blown glass spheres suspended from the ceiling. A motif Hatoum has revisited throughout her career, the web simultaneously evokes feelings of security and connectedness as well as entrapment and unease. As the artist suggests, it can be read both as a place of refuge and protection and as a symbol of oppressive structures.

In the central gallery, Map (red) confronts visitors with a fragile world map made from thousands of red glass spheres. With political borders erased, only the silhouettes of the continents remain visible. Hatoum's use of the Gall–Peters projection points to the fact that world maps are never neutral systems of representation but have historically reflected particular power relations. In the final section of Cisterna, the kinetic installation all of a quiver oscillates continuously between collapse and recovery, encapsulating the exhibition's central premise: a world defined not by stability, but by a constant state of fragility.

Summer programme at Cinema Godard 

Cinema Godard Summer Programme

June - July 2026

Fondazione Prada, Milan

Cinema Godard

Fondazione Prada's Cinema Godard continues its summer programme with screenings, talks, and special selections highlighting different facets of contemporary cinema. Curated by Paolo Moretti, the programme brings together a wide-ranging selection spanning preview screenings of new releases, conversations with filmmakers, genre cinema, and classics.

Highlights of the June programme include Sofia Coppola, Bruce LaBruce, Fabrice Aragno, and Luc Merenda. The #Soggettiva section focuses on Sofia Coppola's filmmaking on the occasion of her latest film, Marc by Sofia, with the director taking part in a masterclass and introducing one of her films. #Queerelle explores contemporary queer cinema, featuring a conversation dedicated to Bruce LaBruce's artistic practice. Meanwhile, #Anteprima presents the screening of Fabrice Aragno's debut feature Le Lac, accompanied by a special discussion on his more than two-decade collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard.

The programme further expands through sections dedicated to different currents in contemporary cinema. #Supernova spotlights emerging filmmakers, #Nocturna is devoted to genre cinema, and #Sonic examines the relationship between music and the moving image. A special programme conceived in dialogue with Cao Fei's ongoing Dash exhibition in Milan also includes a screening of Chen Kaige's 1984 film Yellow Earth. Before the summer break, the #Flashback selection brings back some of the season's most popular films, rounding out Fondazione Prada's summer programme with a strong focus on cinema.

Between science fiction and reality

The Island

Hito Steyerl

4 December 2025 - 30 October 2026

Osservatorio, Milan

The Island, Exhibition view

Hito Steyerl's The Island, on view at Osservatorio, explores the intersections between science fiction, artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and political pressures on scientific research. Centred on a new film created for the project, the exhibition combines video installations, objects, and interviews to invite viewers to rethink notions of time and space. Drawing on the possibilities offered by quantum physics and science fiction, Steyerl investigates the idea that multiple realities can exist simultaneously.

One of the exhibition's points of departure is an experience recounted by science fiction theorist Darko Suvin during the Second World War in Zagreb. Suvin describes imagining himself inside the universe of Flash Gordon while living through aerial bombardments, realising that other worlds could be possible. Building on this story, Steyerl approaches science fiction not as a form of escape but as a means of imagining the present differently. Throughout the exhibition, visitors move continuously between narratives spanning the Neolithic period and the future, archaeology and artificial intelligence, and popular culture and the history of science.

At the heart of the exhibition is the story of a 7,000-year-old artificial island discovered off the Croatian coast and now submerged beneath the sea. Flooded as a consequence of climate change, the site becomes the starting point for connections between past and future. Bringing together the submerged island with research into bioluminescent plankton, the history of science fiction, and quantum physics, Steyerl shifts attention towards temporal scales that extend far beyond the human. In doing so, The Island highlights the tension between today's accelerated, technology-driven experience of time and the much longer rhythms of historical and geological time.

Images and contradictions of America

Helter Skelter

Arthur Jafa & Richard Prince

9 May - 23 November 2026

Ca' Corner della Regina, Venice

Helter Skelter, Exhibition view

Presented at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice, Helter Skelter brings together the work of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince on this scale for the first time. Curated by Nancy Spector, the exhibition examines contemporary America through the two artists' shared strategies of appropriating, transforming, and recontextualising images. Bringing together more than fifty works spanning photography, video, sculpture, painting, and installation, the exhibition reveals unexpected affinities between their practices.

Although Jafa and Prince belong to different generations, both draw extensively from the vast visual archive of American popular culture. Films, advertisements, comic books, social media posts, music culture, and celebrity imagery all serve as key source material. Jafa's engagement with the African American experience and the visual history of Black culture enters into dialogue with Prince's exploration of American subcultures and the myths surrounding white masculinity, establishing a shared critical framework throughout the exhibition.

Works from different periods are presented through a series of thematic encounters. Large-scale installations evoking American car culture are placed alongside visual connections built around the image of the sun, while video and photographic works exploring desire, loss, identity, and violence unfold across the galleries. Through these juxtapositions, the exhibition approaches America not as a single narrative but as a complex network shaped by music, race, protest, celebrity culture, religion, and popular imagery.

The exhibition's title, Helter Skelter, is itself central to this approach. An expression that has accumulated multiple and often contradictory meanings within popular culture, it becomes a metaphor for disorder, conflict, and cultural tension. By recirculating and reconfiguring existing images, Jafa and Prince reveal both the visible and hidden stories of America while opening up new perspectives on ongoing debates surrounding representation, authorship, ownership, and the writing of history.