MILAN.- Fondazione Prada announces its activities for 2026 within its three permanent venues in Milan and Venice. By fostering an international network of artists, curators, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars, Fondazione Prada aspires to investigate human culture in all its variety and complexity. Its efforts focus on discovering new and engaging ways to approach emerging topics in the cultural debate beyond the boundaries of specific disciplines.
As stated by Miuccia Prada, President and Director of Fondazione Prada, “In 2026, our institution will try to operate as a laboratory of ideas—an experimental platform that continuously re-constitutes itself in response to the transformations of our social and cultural landscape. Artists and intellectuals from diverse generations and backgrounds will push us to frame urgent issues from multiple viewpoints, challenge current ideas, and think more profoundly.”
From January 2026, Fondazione Prada will present a broad range of exhibition formats and cultural initiatives stemming from its ever-evolving research process. The program will include thematic exhibitions, solo shows dedicated to prominent art figures such as Cao Fei, Cyprien Gaillard, Mona Hatoum, Arthur Jafa, Richard Prince, and Hito Steyerl, an extensive cinema program and talk series, musical projects and live performances, seminars, and publishing and educational activities.
The exhibition program will start with “Over, under and in between”, a site-specific project conceived by artist Mona Hatoum for Fondazione Prada’s Milan premises, from 29 January to 9 November 2026. Actively reacting to the space of the Cisterna building, 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. The three installations comprising this solo presentation explore three archetypal elements of her artistic vocabulary: the web, the map, and the grid. The three independent works embody ideas of instability, danger, and fragility to varying degrees of intensity and sensibility, creating a dialogue with the space and, in particular, the viewer’s physical experience.
Cao Fei’s new multimedia project “Dash” will be on view from 9 April to 28 September 2026 at the Milan headquarters. Over the past three years, the artist has immersed herself in farmlands across southern and northwestern China, as well as Southeast Asia, observing and interpreting the emergence of smart agriculture. Combining multiple languages ranging from photography to video installation, from virtual reality to documentary footage, and archival material, the artist traces a complex portrait of a global agricultural technological revolution marked by inherent contradictions. The project reflects on how technology enhances efficiency, reduces labor, and safeguards food security amid climate uncertainty and rural aging. It also explores how algorithms are displacing traditional knowledge, reshaping human-land relationships, and changing rural-urban dynamics, raising concerns about ecology, employment, and cultural continuity.
The exhibition “Helter Skelter: Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince”, curated by Nancy Spector and presented in Venice from 9 May to 23 November 2026 during the Art Biennale, will constitute a dialogue between two prominent visual artists. Born a decade apart, they share an ethos of lawlessness when it comes to the appropriation and manipulation of images siphoned from movies, pulp novels, comic books, YouTube videos, sci-fi stories, album covers, record sleeves, rock ‘n’ roll posters, first-edition Beat volumes, news reels, celebrity memorabilia, and social-media posts. Trafficking heavily in American popular culture, they expose its grit and grift, while embracing many of its myths and perversions. Both artists chart peculiar topographies specific to the United States: Jafa’s reflecting his identity as an African American man coupled with a mission to invigorate Black cinema and art; Prince’s hovering between a self-conscious critique of white masculinity and a fascination with the underbelly of the American psyche. The installation will unfold through a series of thematic juxtapositions, combinations of works by both artists that illuminate each of their practices and tease out shared subject matter and mutual obsessions. “Helter Skelter” will reveal a long creative conversation between Jafa and Prince that, until now, has never been examined.
The research project “Global Antiquity”, curated by Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola with the collaboration of Chiara Ballestrazzi, will unfold in a set designed by Rem Koolhaas and AMO/OMA for the Podium, the main exhibition space at the Milan venue, from 5 November 2026 to 1 March 2027. This exhibition offers an unexpected perspective on the interactions between Mediterranean cultures and those of Eastern Africa and Asia over a broad chronological span (ca 600 BC–ca 900 AD). Each of the objects brought together from around the globe becomes an actual storyteller and illustrates a highly complex dynamic at play. For instance, the presence of Greco-Roman artifacts in China or Indian objects in Europe can be traced to a dense, long-lasting web of relationships connecting different continents. Cultural exchanges are narrated by highlighting their reciprocity and, at times, their symmetry. Accordingly, the interaction between different parts of the world is articulated not along linear and univocal paths, but rather as a fluid, ever-evolving network of polygonal routes. An underlying theme of the project resonates powerfully in today’s debate by examining the dialectical relationship between the concepts of “globality” and “globalization.” As explored in the exhibition, “globality” is more linked to the ancient world and follows horizontal, osmotic, and reciprocal dynamics. In contrast, “globalization” refers to a modern or contemporary system defined by vertical, top-down processes driven by economic and political forces at the global scale.
With her site-specific project “The Island”, on view until 30 October 2026 at the Osservatorio, artist, scholar, and filmmaker Hito Steyerl delves into multiple narratives united by the recurring motif of flooding, evoking urgent topics such as current authoritarian tendencies fostered by the use of AI, the climate crisis, and political pressures on science.
The exhibition features a new film created by Steyerl specifically for this project, which converges into a video installation and gives rise to a series of objects, structures, and video interviews. Through these works, time and space are reorganized by borrowing the logic of quantum physics and science fiction to explore their aesthetic and political dimensions.
The upcoming project on view at the Osservatorio from December 2026 to July 2027 will be a collaboration with artist Cyprien Gaillard. This exhibition stems from the artist’s ongoing exploration of the gradual disappearance of public space, eroded by privatization and security policies, and the decontextualization of culture to the point of its exploitation as a weapon of control. Conceived for the Osservatorio space in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which was the modern heart of Milan in the second half of the 20th century, the project investigates the complex and generative process of building a relationship with historical, architectural, and artistic heritage. The urban fabric, which takes shape from the collision between preservation and speculation, will emerge in the exhibition as concrete traces left by the society that inhabits it.
Fondazione Prada’s twenty-year commitment to cinema will be further strengthened through the wide-ranging Cinema Godard program in Milan, conceived by curator Paolo Moretti as an extended, ever-evolving festival. In 2026, the program will continue to present new releases and restored classics, special previews and retrospectives, while further developing recurring collaborations with film festivals, magazines, archives, and other institutions. A key element remains a regular series of talks and masterclasses with international and Italian directors, artists, actors, critics, and other creative figures working across cinema, music, and the visual arts. Fondazione Prada Film Fund, launched in 2025 and totaling 1.5 million euros in funding, is dedicated to sustaining independent cinema. With a broad, inclusive outlook and no geographic constraints, this annual initiative supports heterogeneous feature films across genres, production scales, and artistic approaches, contributing to the plurality and vitality of contemporary filmmaking. It aims to identify and promote projects that stand out in today’s film landscape for their artistic excellence and their resonance with Fondazione Prada’s cultural mission. In February 2026, the selected projects for the Film Fund’s first edition will be announced, alongside the dates of the next call for entries.
“Human Brains”, the long-term project dedicated to brain studies, will resume its activities in Autumn 2026, further expanding its multidisciplinary approach. The initiative reaffirms Fondazione Prada’s commitment to scientific research, engaging the public in the field of neuroscience and brain studies at large, and fostering exchanges among scholars to support the development of international dialogue.
In 2026, Fondazione Prada will continue to explore the landscape of experimental and contemporary music through two longstanding collaborations. The partnership with Threes will be renewed, featuring three live performances at the Church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa in Milan, which hosts a permanent light intervention by Dan Flavin, commissioned by Fondazione Prada in 1997. On 4 February 2026, American composer and organist Kali Malone will present a selection of tracks from her albums All Life Long and The Sacrificial Code, adapted for the organ of the church. In Autumn 2026, Fondazione Prada will further strengthen its annual collaboration with the Luigi Nono Festival by organizing a special event in Venice dedicated to the Italian composer, expanding its ongoing commitment to musical research.
In 2026, Fondazione Prada will release five illustrated publications that will accompany each exhibition, further investigating the themes they address, commissioning new essay texts from international writers and curators, and conducting interviews and conversations with artists. In particular, three extensive catalogues will be published for “Dash”, “Helter Skelter”, and “Global Antiquity”, as well as two publications in the Quaderni series will be dedicated to the show “Over, under and in between” and Cyprien Gaillard’s project.
As part of the education program, Accademia dei bambini continues to offer its free activities for children, with thematic workshops held on weekends. Until 8 March 2026, children are accompanied through a chromatic journey, investigating the effect of colors through music, free movement, gestures, expression, and creativity in a workshop titled “Colori emotivi” (Emotional Colors), conceived by curator Valentina Lucio, visual artist Narjes Ghorbani, and photographer and videomaker Amin Zarif. In 2026, Accademia dei bambini will continue to expand 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 ninth edition of the Premio di Laurea (Degree Award) winner will be announced in June 2026. 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.
