MILAN.- Fondazione Prada announces its main activities for 2025 and early 2026 within its three permanent venues in Milan and Venice and two outposts in Shanghai and Tokyo. By fostering a broad network of artists, curators, filmmakers, architects, musicians and scholars, Fondazione Prada addresses an international and plural audience. Its effort focuses on finding new and engaging ways to explore emerging ideas in the cultural field and tackle intellectual challenges beyond the boundaries of specific disciplines.

As stated by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, “Also in the months to come, our institution will try to act as an observatory on the transformations of our social and cultural landscape, involving artists and thinkers of different generations and backgrounds to help us frame urgent topics from multiple perspectives and think more profoundly.”

From January 2025, Fondazione Prada will introduce a plurality of exhibition formats and cultural initiatives stemming from its continuous research process. The program will include thematic exhibitions and solo shows dedicated to prominent art figures, special projects conceived by international film directors, musical programs and live performances, an extensive film screening and talk series, in addition to ongoing activities within the publishing and education fields.

Osservatorio, located at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, will host “A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema” from 30 January to 8 September 2025.

Curated by Melissa Harris, the exhibition sheds light on the complex creative process behind filmmaking by exploring storyboards and other materials intrinsic to this process, such as mood boards, drawings and sketches, scrapbooks and notebooks, annotated scripts, and photography. Set in a display designed by the Berlin-based architecture office Sub, the project comprises more than eight hundred items created from the late 1920s to 2024 by over fifty authors among film directors, cinematographers, visual artists, graphic designers, animators, choreographers, and other collaborators on film and video production. A second chapter of the exhibition will be held at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai from 4 November 2025 to 2 February 2026, further developing these themes.

“Typologien”, an extensive survey dedicated to 20th-century German photography, will be presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan from 3 April to 14 July 2025. The exhibition, hosted within Podium, the central space of the Milan venue, is curated by Susanne Pfeffer, art historian and director of the MUSEUM MMK FÜR MODERNE KUNST, Frankfurt. The curatorial strategy consists of an attempt to apply the principle of “typology” originating in botany and manifested in photography, for instance of Karl Blossfeldt and August Sander, to the history of all 20th-century German photography, including the practice of artists from Düsseldorf School or the photographic series of Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel or Isa Genzken, as well as conceptual experiments of Hans-Peter Feldmann or Marianne Wex. Paradoxically, the given formal principle allows for unexpected convergences of German artists of different generations and the manifestation of their individual approaches.

“NADA” by Belgian artist Thierry De Cordier is an exhibition project conceived for the three- part Cisterna building at the Milan venue. Running from 3 April to 29 September 2025, the show will bring together ten large-scale paintings from the so-called NADA series. The first works of this series arose from the intention to abolish the image of “Christ on the Cross” in a demonstrative way. The resulting abstract works are no longer a form of negative painting, but an ultimate attempt to experience the “grandeur of nothingness”.

An immersive exhibition conceived by Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu investigates the cinematic and cultural dimensions of Amores Perros (2000), his cult film part of his Trilogy, completed by his following films 21 Grams and Babel. The project will be on view in Milan from 18 September 2025 to 26 February 2026. A dark environment features 35- millimetre projectors that will screen some raw, never before-seen footage, and outtakes left on the editorial archives from the original sequences that helped to shape the original filming process. This liminal space invites visitors to delve into the atmosphere of the three intertwining stories in a chaotic Mexico City at the beginning of the new Millennium narrated by this film. This project is Fondazione Prada’s third collaboration with Iñárritu, who conceived the film program “Flesh, Mind and Spirit” in 2016 and the experimental VR installation “CARNE Y ARENA,” which premiered at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and awarded a special Oscar.

In an exhibition conceived for the Osservatorio, artist, essayist and university lecturer Hito Steyerl explores multiple narratives united by the recurring element of flooding, evoking urgent topics such as the climate crisis and its geopolitical and cultural implications. On view from 4 December 2025 to 30 October 2026, the exhibition, divided into four thematic and narrative sections, will include a film she is making expressly for this project that will converge into a video installation and originate a series of holograms, sculptures, structures, and video interviews. Through these works, time and space are shattered and reorganized by borrowing the logic of quantum physics to explore its aesthetic and visual dimensions.

From January to September 2026, artist Mona Hatoum will present a site-specific project in the Cisterna spaces on Milan’s premises. This solo presentation features two new installations conceived in dialogue with a towering, kinetic structure titled all of a quiver (2022). Actively reacting to the exhibition context, Hatoum develops a three-part project, in which each segment gravitates around thought-provoking themes that reflect on the turmoil of our times and the precariousness of our existence.

From 10 May to 24 November 2025, on the occasion of the Architecture Biennale, the Venice venue, Ca’ Corner della Regina, will host an exhibition dedicated to diagrams and conceived by the AMO/OMA studio, led by Rem Koolhaas. The material from the 7th century to the present day of different geographical origins is organised according to a thematic principle that reflects not just contemporary world urgencies, but demonstrates de facto their transversal and diachronic nature. In this sense, the diagram becomes synonymous with human cognitive activity: “to draw is to minimize, realize and internalize” (Theo Deutinger) and to abstract visible reality. The diagram in the project therefore functions as a universal communication mechanism for ideas or misconceptions, political processes or ventures, social disasters or local disruptions. It becomes not only a visual artefact of human history, but inevitably raises the question of responsibility and the possibility of change.

“Mirroring: Lucio Fontana and Michelangelo Pistoletto” will take place at Prada Rong Zhai, the 1918 historical residence in Shanghai, from 20 March to 15 June 2025. This project, realised in collaboration with Fondazione Lucio Fontana and Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto, will be curated by Sook-Kyung Lee, Director of the Whitworth, part of the University of Manchester. For the first time, the two Italian artists, who are generationally separated, are put in dialogue with one another, revealing their respective approaches to the matter and the conceptual dimension of art, their exploration of alternative performative spaces, and the presence of the metaphysical in each of their practices. The exhibition gathers works from the 1950s onward which underline their search for new forms of expression and the rejection of materials, methods, and subjects perceived as the paradigm of the past. The show explores their approaches to overcome painting restrictions and use materials drawn from the world beyond fine art. In 1948 Fontana created the Concetto spaziale (Spatial Concept), and in 1961 Pistoletto realised Quadro specchiante (Mirror Painting) the spatio-temporal work. The three-dimensionality of their artistic objects is another focus of the exhibition, accompanied by a reflection on the performative aspect of their practices.

A new collaboration between movie director Nicolas Winding Refn and game creator Hideo Kojima will take the form of an exhibition titled “Satellites” envisioned by byNWR to be held at Prada Aoyama Tokyo, the iconic building designed by Herzog & De Meuron, from 18 April to 25 August 2025. The project highlights the elective affinities between the two authors, allowing them to transcend the individual dimension and overcome language barriers. These dissolve into a connection fueled by shared thought processes, hinting at a future common territory made possible by technologies that blur the boundaries between media. The show transports visitors to a cinema-inspired interior where holographic projections of Winding Refn and Kojima appear, locked in a contemplative conversation. The sound of their voices— one in English, the other in Japanese— invites visitors to witness the creation of an intimate experience of discovery and interpretation.

One of the key events of the 2025 program dedicated to heterogeneous music languages will be the third collaboration with the “Riccardo Muti Italian Opera Academy”, an educational project addressed to international young conductors and piano répétiteurs. From 18 to 30 November 2025 at the Deposito, the widest space of Fondazione Prada’s Milan premises, the public will have the unique opportunity to take part in an intense experience of learning in the field of classical music led by Maestro Riccardo Muti, attending a series of lessons, rehearsals, and concerts focused on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Fondazione Prada’s commitment to music will also be demonstrated by the ongoing collaboration with Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono on the occasion of the Festival Luigi Nono alla Giudecca, a homage to the Italian experimental composer, which takes place in Venice each year in November, and two live performances in Milan by contemporary composers and musicians. The first event will feature the multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, a significant figure in electronic music, on 23 April 2025. The second event will showcase the experimental organist and sound designer Kali Malone on 10 December 2025. Both live performances, organised with Threes, will be hosted at Santa Maria Annunciata Church in Chiesa Rossa, which displays a permanent light intervention by Dan Flavin commissioned by Fondazione Prada in 1997.

Cinema Godard is Fondazione Prada’s movie theatre in Milan, where creative visions and unexpected perspectives of the cinematic landscape, both past and present, are explored, intertwining moving images, visual arts, and music. In 2025, Cinema Godard will continue expanding its program, conceived by curator Paolo Moretti as an extended and ever- evolving festival. Each month, its calendar offers screenings of new releases and restored classics, special previews, and retrospectives, activating recurring collaborations with film festivals, magazines, archives and other institutions. A key programming element is a regular series of talks and masterclasses with international and Italian directors, artists, actors, critics and other figures in the cinema field, providing a unique opportunity to connect with its diverse community.

In 2025, Fondazione Prada will release seven illustrated publications that will accompany the exhibition activities, further developing the themes they address, commissioning international writers and curators new essay texts and conducting interviews and conversations with artists and film directors. In particular, two extensive catalogues will be published for “Typologien” in Milan and the exhibition curated by Rem Koolhaas in Venice and five publications of the Quaderni series will be dedicated to the shows “A Kind of Language”, “NADA: Thierry de Cordier” and the projects by Nicolas Winding Refn with Hideo Kojima, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Hito Steyerl.

As part of the education program, Accademia dei bambini has resumed its free activities for children, with thematic workshops held on weekends. Until 23 March 2025, the new workshop series “La luce” (The Light) will be conceived by architect Alessandro Pedretti to encourage children to explore this fundamental element of our daily lives and the focus of artistic and scientific research. In 2025, Accademia dei bambini will continue extending the reach of its activities also to elementary and preschools. Every Wednesday, school classes from Milan can participate free of charge in workshops conceived each time by different “masters”: architects, pedagogues, artists, scientists, filmmakers, and musicians.

The eighth edition of the Premio di Laurea (Degree Award) winner will be announced in June 2025. Created by Fondazione Prada in 2018, this annual initiative rewards the commitment of students who have presented a graduation thesis about cultural themes within the following Milan universities: Università degli Studi di Milano, Politecnico di Milano, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Università Bocconi, Libera Università di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM and Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele.