PRESENTATION: Mona Hatoum-Over, Under and In Between
Mona Hatoum, a London-based artist born in Beirut, has long married poetic sensibility with political urgency in work that spans performance, video, sculpture, photography, and installation. Her practice explores themes of displacement, vulnerability, containment, and power structures, often engaging viewers in direct, bodily encounters.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive
Mona Hatoum’s site-specific project “Over, Under and in Between” at Fondazione Prada, Milan combines fragile materials and monumental forms to confront the instability of our times and the precariousness of existence.
“Over, Under and In Between” is a site-specific installation conceived for the Cisterna space at Fondazione Prada in Milan—a cavernous industrial hall formerly part of a distillery. The exhibition comprises three autonomous works that activate the architecture’s height, volume, and raw surface to amplify sensations of fragility, tension, and exposure.
Glass spheres form a suspended web overhead in the entrance room of the Cisterna. This delicate, transparent network evokes the ambiguity of webs—as both traps and shelters—suggesting entrapment and connection simultaneously.
Upon entering, visitors encounter a vast spider’s web constructed from hand-blown glass spheres threaded on fine wires. The motif of the web is longstanding in Hatoum’s work, used to explore themes such as entrapment, neglect, intimacy, and connectedness. In this installation, the web floats above the viewer, the spheres recalling dew drops or celestial constellations, and suggesting a fragile yet cosmic sense of interdependence.
Loose red glass spheres arranged on the floor form a map of the continents without political borders. This configuration foregrounds instability and the fragility of geopolitical constructs.
In the central room, the concrete floor is covered with more than 30,000 translucent red glass balls arranged to outline only the continents, deliberately omitting political and geographic borders. The loose configuration is inherently unstable and open, inviting reflection on territory and authority.
Hatoum selected the Gall-Peters projection—which preserves land mass proportions more equitably than the traditional Mercator projection—to underscore how maps are never neutral representations but are embedded in power relations and histories of domination.
In the final room, “all of a quiver”, a monumental grid of open, stacked cubes, responds to the vertical volume of the Cisterna. A motorized mechanism animates the structure, causing it to sway, buckle, and recover, producing creaks and clanks that anthropomorphize the work.
This installation draws on Minimalist aesthetics but transforms rigid form into a living system that evokes the precariousness of survival, balancing between construction and destruction, resistance and collapse. It invites visitors to contemplate instability not as a condition to be mastered, but as a state to inhabit.
Mona Hatoum’s “Over, Under and in Between “demonstrates her enduring ability to translate poetic formal gestures into powerful spatial experiences that challenge viewers’ perception of stability and power. Through webs, maps, and grids, she invites us into a profound engagement with fragility, vulnerability, and the tensions that shape our world.
Photo: Mona Hatoum, “Over, under and in between”, Exhibition view Fondazione Prada-Milan, 2026, Photo: Roberto Marossi, Courtesy Fondazione Prada
Info: Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Italy, Duration: 29/1-9/11/2026, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.fondazioneprada.org/
