The Island

What a thrill to see The Island, Hito Steyerl’s exhibition at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan. Visitors who reach the fifth floor — taking the elevator next to Marchesi pastry shop — suddenly find themselves facing something unexpected: a contemporary art museum. Behind the ticket desk, the staff repeatedly chant, often in English: “This is a museum, not a rooftop!” For art lovers and industry insiders, however, Hito Steyerl’s exhibition is a true gem.

Osservatorio is Fondazione Prada’s space dedicated to the experimentation of visual languages and to the exploration of possible connections between technology and different cultural expressions.

With the site-specific project The Island, Hito Steyerl intertwines several themes, including the danger of authoritarian drifts fueled by technology and artificial intelligence, as well as the political pressures exerted on the scientific community.

Steyerl investigates the aesthetic and visual dimensions of quantum physics and science fiction, presenting here a new film (on the second floor) alongside four video installations.

Time is the dimension through which Hito Steyerl develops and grounds her artistic research: time beyond human comprehension, space-time leaps, and “junk time” — wasted time — with loops that generate exhaustion and addiction, much like scrolling endlessly on Instagram. Here, that time is traced back to the Neolithic era. The result is an elusive present, a threatening future, and a past flowing beneath our feet, buried under centuries of history.