Mona Hatoum makes beautiful things that do not wish us well. A glass sphere catches the light; a grid settles into order; a map offers the reassuring outline of a world. Then the body enters, and elegance develops nerves.
At Fondazione Prada in Milan, Over, under and in between (29 January–9 November 2026) occupies the three chambers of the Cisterna, built in 1909 for distillery tanks. The industrial shell matters: this was architecture made to contain volatile matter, and the new contents recover that memory without illustrating it. Hatoum gives each room one governing condition: a web overhead, a world underfoot and a tower that cannot keep its composure.
Beauty with a trap inside
Web is made from hand-blown clear glass spheres threaded on stainless-steel cable. Suspended above the visitor, it can read as a constellation, necklace or snare. That instability is Hatoum’s method. Seduction is not decoration applied before the danger; it is how the danger gains access.
The work belongs beside Anish Kapoor’s bodily voids and Olafur Eliasson’s instruments of perception. All three artists make looking physical. Hatoum is the least consoling: her room notices you back.
The world becomes loose
In the central chamber, Map (red) spreads more than thirty thousand red glass balls across the floor. Continents remain recognisable, but no border is fixed; a footstep, vibration or accident could rearrange the planet. The map is exact enough to identify and too precarious to trust.
It is tempting to translate this immediately into a diagram of war, exile and Palestine. Those histories matter, but Hatoum has long resisted the single explanatory key. The work is stronger when geopolitics and domestic anxiety remain entangled: the large world is unstable because the small object beneath your shoe can move.
A grid learns to panic
The final room contains all of a quiver, a tall metallic lattice that repeatedly buckles and rises with reverberant mechanical sound. Minimalism’s grid, that emblem of cool control, behaves as if it has developed fear. Architecture no longer shelters the body; it rehearses collapse in front of it. The visitor’s route becomes a choreography of ducking, stepping and waiting for the structure to right itself.
This could become signature spectacle—three photogenic threats amplified by Prada’s formidable rooms. Yet the fabrication never feels merely grand. As in the visible intelligence of the hand, precision is what gives the unease its force: every sphere, cable and joint must be convincing before instability can feel real.
No safe interpretation
Hatoum calls her works open systems, and the phrase matters. A web is protection and capture. A map is knowledge and fantasy. A tower is structure and failure. The exhibition refuses the luxury of choosing one meaning and leaving with it intact.
The wall that stands perfectly still asks very little of us. Hatoum’s buckling one does more: it makes equilibrium look temporary, beauty look complicit and the room beneath our feet newly, productively unsure.