Image: Fondazione Prada, Milan
Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan is presenting “The Island,” a new exhibition by Hito Steyerl that links artificial intelligence, misinformation, political power and environmental crisis through an immersive multimedia installation. Running until October 30, 2026, the show brings together a new film, video installations, sculptures and interviews in a format designed to stage Steyerl’s ongoing investigation into the political life of images.
The exhibition arrives at a moment when AI-generated content has become a central concern across the art world and beyond. In the material provided by Fondazione Prada, Steyerl describes “The Island” as a science-fiction story that begins with “a terrific brown wave” driven by AI-generated junk content and poised to engulf the planet, while emphasizing that the fiction is built largely from real facts. That framing places the project within her wider practice, which has repeatedly examined how images circulate, are manipulated, and are made visible or erased within technological, economic and media systems.
At Osservatorio, those questions are expanded into a broader reflection on authoritarian tendencies, climate change and pressure on the scientific community. The exhibition’s non-linear structure ties together disparate references and temporal scales: it moves between fantasy, quantum physics and political reality, while also connecting memories of wartime Zagreb, the iconography of Flash Gordon, an artificial Neolithic island that was submerged, bioluminescence and AI-generated imagery. Rather than treating these as separate subjects, the show uses montage to suggest how contemporary crises are shaped by overlapping narratives and historical echoes.
Fondazione Prada also highlights the exhibition’s interest in time as a conceptual framework. “The Island” contrasts what the institution describes as “junk time” — a hyper-fragmented technological time bound up with capitalism — with “deep time,” the geological and planetary scale that exceeds human systems. That contrast gives the project a wider philosophical dimension and places it in conversation with current debates about how digital acceleration changes perception, memory and political attention.
The exhibition is on view at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan, a venue within Fondazione Prada’s broader institutional program. The foundation has also produced Quaderno #40, “Hito Steyerl – The Island,” which is available online and at Osservatorio and in Milan, extending the exhibition’s themes beyond the gallery space. The project thus combines exhibition display, publication and public-facing programming around a single body of work.
“The Island” matters because it brings several of the most urgent issues in contemporary culture into one concise artistic framework: AI-generated misinformation, the aesthetics of scientific and political uncertainty, and the environmental stakes of technological systems. By presenting these tensions through filmic and sculptural form rather than explanatory argument alone, Steyerl continues to position art as a site where the politics of images can be made visible, contested and reimagined.
