Mona Hatoum Transforms the Cisterna: Fragility and Tension at Fondazione Prada

At Fondazione Prada, Mona Hatoum transforms the Cisterna into a living organism, a place that vibrates under the weight of contemporary uncertainty. Over, under and in between unfolds as an exhibition in three movements, each built around a core element of her visual vocabulary - the spiderweb, the map, the grid. Three archetypes that become emotional structures - perceptual devices through which to read the fragility of the present. In the first room, a suspended constellation of hand-blown glass spheres forms a luminous yet unsettling web. It is a precarious sky made of delicate connections, where each node holds both attraction and repulsion, memory and entrapment. The journey continues across a floor entirely covered with more than thirty thousand translucent red glass spheres - a borderless world map, an unstable globe composed of free, mobile elements that can shift shape at the slightest movement. Here, Hatoum suggests a vulnerable, open geography exposed to invisible forces. In the final room, monumentality turns into restless motion. all of a quiver is a towering structure of nine stacked, open metal cubes - a grid resembling the skeletal frame of a building on the verge of collapse. The piece sways, creaks, drops and rises again, as if it were breathing. It is a slow choreography between destruction and resilience, a body that trembles but refuses to fall. With these three works, Hatoum redefines space as a physical and psychological experience - a landscape where instability and beauty coexist in a delicate, ever-shifting balance.