Hito Steyerl. The Island
Osservatorio Fondazione Prada, Milan
From December 4 until October 30, 2026
If we were to draw up a list of contemporary prophets, Hito Steyerl would almost certainly be on it. Born in Munich in 1966, the German artist is a filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, writer, and, in many ways, a kind of oracle. She reads the present as if it were already past, and the future as if it had already arrived. Few artists match her clarity in decoding technology and its failures, perhaps because she understood early on that the digital was never an aesthetic but a dense ecosystem–political, economic, sensorial.
From December 4 through October 30, 2026, Steyerl presents The Island at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada. This site-specific project combines video, installations, 3D scans, interviews, traditional singing, salvaged wood, and cinema–a constellation of images that frames flooding as a condition of the present: information spilling over, reality losing coherence even as its details grow sharper.
Steyerl, who topped the ArtReview Power 100 in 2017, is among the most forward-looking intellectuals of the 21st century. Her writing—fast, pointed, combustible—has shaped the debate around digital imagery for two decades. She’s the one who asks, with perfect timing, “Is the Internet dead?”; the one who, in Politics of Art (2010), fires the shot: “What is the function of art within disaster capitalism?”. And the one who reminds us: “Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neo-liberal thick of things.” In an age soothed by blue light, such words land like an alarm. Steyerl clears the fog, sharpens the picture, and brings us back to the fault line where reality meets image. At sixteen she worked as a stunt performer, was expelled from school, and soon after admitted to the Academy of Visual Arts in Tokyo, where she studied cinematography and documentary film. Her path is full of sharp turns that have given her work its broad, grounded frame. Often called a “post-internet” artist, Steyerl uses the digital as an investigative toolkit–software, generative AI, archives, code–to expose parts of the present we’re not always eager to see.
In The Island, that beam of attention settles on a story that rises and sinks, a kind of elastic time sliding between reality and fiction. The project begins with an anecdote the critic and theorist Darko Suvin (1930, Croatia) once told her. During a 1941 bombing in Zagreb, a young Suvin imagined himself inside Flash Gordon, heading for Mars—finding shelter in fiction. From that moment, Steyerl draws an almost quantum rule: two realities can coexist without erasing each other—the lived and the imagined.
The Island is structured in four chapters—The Artificial Island, Lucciole, The Birth of Science Fiction, and Flash!—linking archaeology, sci-fi, marine biology, AI, and historical memory. The first revolves around the discovery of a submerged Neolithic island in Dalmatia, reconstructed through photogrammetry; in Lucciole, bioluminescent plankton becomes the planet’s pulse. The Birth of Science Fiction returns to Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement”, the idea that distance and invention can make reality clearer. Flash! turns to cinema as a mental shelter—the kind of place where a teenager under bombardment could picture Mars as a viable exit.
The exhibition opens on the lower level, in a room with an underwater feel, where a suspended sphere projects the 3D scan of the Neolithic site—an eye just beneath the surface. Nearby, four LED screens feature interviews with scientists, archaeologists, and linguists, while sea-worn driftwood holds Suvin’s poems, reappearing like small fossil traces. Upstairs, the space shifts into a cinema: red velvet seats, a large screen. The threads introduced below merge into a single film, where sci-fi, archaeology, Croatian Klapa singing, and AI-generated imagery run together. Here Steyerl pits junk time against deep time—the throwaway tempo of the digital against the broad, steady rhythm of the tides, which roll on with no regard for our refresh buttons.
Sometimes Steyerl’s work slips just past our line of sight. Not because it’s obscure, but because the world she’s trying to map only gets denser the closer you look. And she has no intention of tidying it up. When asked what The Island is about, she pauses—the pause of someone who knows no single word will do the job. Then she says: “quantum physics, archaeology, and fascism.” And adds: “also biochemistry.” And so, after moving through screens, submerged islands, and quantum principles, the meaning almost reveals itself: it takes only a moment away from the screen to return to the world in motion. Steyerl does not want to enlighten us; she simply wants to place before our eyes what is already there. No solutions, no redemption. And if the sinking islands are metaphors, then perhaps the only thing left to hold onto is an aesthetic honest enough not to pretend it has answers—but clear-eyed enough to help us see.
For further information Fondazioneprada.org.
