Hito Steyerl's solo exhibition "The Island" at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan explores the concept of submersion as both a geological condition and a media regime. The show takes its title from a Neolithic artificial island discovered off the coast of Korčula, Croatia, which remained submerged for approximately seven thousand years. Through video interviews, installations, and critical assemblages, Steyerl connects this submerged structure to contemporary issues of digital image circulation, algorithmic power, and the dispossession of agency, drawing on science fiction, quantum physics, biochemistry, and deep time.
The exhibition matters because it offers a critical framework for understanding how low-resolution, high-circulation artificial images saturate the present while evading duration, creating a state of aesthetic fatigue. By staging ancient questions about reality and image construction within a post-Cartesian medial space, Steyerl challenges viewers to navigate a terrain deformed by algorithmic production. The show positions science fiction and quantum physics as operative epistemologies for alternative meaning-making, making it a timely intervention in debates about digital culture, simulation, and the politics of perception.