Actively reacting to the exhibition context of the Cisterna building, Mona Hatoum develops a site-specific three-part project, three installations that explore three archetypal elements of Hatoum’s artistic vocabulary: the web, the map, and the grid. Their presence reactivates the space of the Cisterna, which housed the silos and tanks of the former alcohol distillery, once located on the Fondazione Prada’s compound, by taking advantage of the height, volume, and shape of its three rooms. The three independent works embody ideas of instability, danger, and fragility to varying degrees of intensity and sensibility, creating a dialogue with space, and particularly the viewer’s physical experience. Web, in the entrance room of the Cisterna, is a large-scale constellation of delicate, transparent, hand-blown glass spheres threaded through wires which forms a spider’s web suspended overhead. In this case, the artist captures the profound ambiguity of the web and the coexistence of repulsion and fascination it evokes.
In the central room of the Cisterna, Map (red) covers the concrete floor with large areas of translucent red glass balls arranged in the shape of a world map, using the Gall-Peters projection rather than the more traditional Mercator projection. Political and geographical borders have been intentionally ignored here, with only the continents delineated. More than thirty thousand spheres, which are not fixed to the floor and can be identified as separate entities, form an unstable configuration that the artist describes as “a loose and undefined territory,” which is potentially susceptible to destabilising external forces.
A towering, kinetic installation entitled all of a quiver responds to the monumental height of the third room of the Cisterna. Consisting of nine levels of open, stacked cubes, the gridded metallic structure mimics scaffolding or the skeleton of a building with its rigid geometry. Resting on the floor and animated by a motorised mechanism, the installation slowly oscillates between downward collapse and re-erection. Sounds of creaking and clanking accompany each row of cubes as the structure sways and zigzags down as if slumping— almost like a body—towards destruction. Once it reaches a certain level, it suddenly begins to sway back upright and then “quiver” right before reaching stillness and resuming its height of 8.6 meters. As architect Lina Ghotmeh writes in her text, “the work embodies what I consider the essence of architectural thinking: it shapes space, it choreographs perception, and it invites the body into a dialogue with form and time.”
From 29 January to 9 November 2026
