Fondazione Prada presents the exhibition “The Island” by artist, scholar, and university professor Hito Steyerl, from December 4, 2025, to October 30, 2026 (press preview Wednesday, December 3, 2025) in the Osservatorio spaces in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.
With the site-specific project “The Island,” Hito Steyerl interweaves multiple narratives united by the recurring motif of flooding, evoking pressing issues such as the current authoritarian tendencies fueled by the use of artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and the political pressure exerted on the scientific community. The exhibition will feature a new film by Steyerl, created specifically for the project, which will flow into a video installation and give rise to a series of sculptures, structures, and video interviews. Through these works, time and space are reorganized, borrowing from the logic of quantum physics and science fiction to explore their aesthetic and visual dimensions.
The practice of Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich, Germany) combines artistic production with theoretical analysis to explore complex sociopolitical and cultural issues, such as the power of the media, the ambivalence of technology and science, and the global circulation of images. Developed from research and interviews, Steyerl’s works lie at the intersection of documentary and experimental cinema, often extending these forms into a spatial or digital dimension.
The idea behind “The Island” stems from an anecdote told to the artist a few years ago by literary critic and academic Darko Suvin (b. 1930, Zagreb, Croatia), author of the seminal work The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, published in 1979. During the explosion of a bomb in Zagreb in 1941, Suvin reacted to the terrifying event by imagining himself in the science fiction film series Flash Gordon: The Conquest of Mars (1938), in which the American comic book hero saves the fate of the Earth. As Steyerl explains: “Suvin realized that in any situation, it’s possible to find other worlds, which is the foundation of science fiction: creating parallel worlds even in the most adverse circumstances. I was deeply fascinated by the inventiveness that allowed science fiction to emerge from an extremely critical event. Later, I realized that this concept could be developed visually through quantum technology, because it deals with sudden changes in the state of matter, but also with the coexistence of different states at the same time.”
In “The Island,” visitors witness continuous shifts between multiple and alternative spatial and temporal dimensions. In this context, science fiction emerges as a factual narrative of fictions that can distance us from our usual perception of reality and become a tool for combining opposing or contradictory worlds, blending fiction and scientific data.
Hito Steyerl’s project unfolds through four interconnected narratives—”Lucciole,” “The Artificial Island,” “The Birth of Science Fiction,” and “Flash!” – and is punctuated by the dimensional leaps typical of science fiction and quantum physics: from animal and plant microorganisms to galaxies, from the Neolithic to the future, from exhibition to filmic space, from literary and poetic narrative to popular culture, from the kitsch aesthetics of comics to low-quality AI-generated content.
The exhibition suggests a time beyond human comprehension, from the Neolithic to the Second World War, with space-time leaps toward the biographical stories of Shimomura and Suvin. With the film and the exhibition project, Hito Steyerl intentionally triggers a productive clash between two different notions: junk time, linked to technology and capitalism that alters the flow of time with continuous leaps and loops that provoke suspension and weariness, and deep time – non-human time, Neolithic time, and underwater time – that flows outside the artificial spectrum generated by human civilizations.
