Hito Steyerl sets solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada

Hito Steyerl, the renowned moving image artist, writer and professor, has been particularly active in 2025, with several exhibitions in Europe and also the publishing of her new book on the impact that AI has on our perception of visual art. It was also recently announced that Steyerl will be given a major solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan.

In her latest moving image work, Steyerl takes a look at the hidden contradictions underlying AI in Mechanical Kurds, currently on display at Jeu de Paume in Paris. In this new film commission presented as part of the exhibition The World According to AI, she hones in on the political implications that are embedded in the development of AI models. Behind this complex digital façade, however, there lurks an army of “click workers”: individuals tasked with moderating content, evaluating responses, verifying data, and tagging images. This digital labor force, dispersed across the globe, tirelessly works to refine how AI operates, often in conditions that are unstable and precarious, and with minimum compensation.

Steyerl is known to be incredibly prolific in her critical writing practice. Over the course of more than a decade she has written a series of incisive essays and books in which she links the fields of images, politics and technology, uncovering the extent to which their mutual interconnectedness has contributed to the spread of authoritarian tendencies in society and politics. In her newest book Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, published by Verso in May this year, Steyerl interrogates the exploitative aspects that structure the development of AI and web3 and how their application and incorporation into the digital and technological fabric subsists off of the cheap labor created by economic instability in regions undergoing geopolitical upheaval.

The emergence and proliferation of large language models has opened up a series of related questions regarding their role in political and creative domains, specifically the impact that generative AI has had on the creation and dissemination of narratives in the geopolitical sphere. In Steyerl's estimation, a cause for particular concern is the potential that such technologies have in bolstering the authoritarian tendencies of governments by providing them with tools that facilitate the enforcement of their aesthetic and bureaucratic goals.

Steyerl's work also extends to concern for the environmental issues which are besetting the planet. In an exhibition which she is developing for the Osservatorio at Fondazione Prada in Milan, Steyerl tackles multiple narratives that are tied together by the recurring imagery of flooding, forefronting the exigency of the climate crisis and its geopolitical and cultural ramifications. The exhibition is composed of four thematically distinct segments and includes film and video installations. The show at the Osservatorio is scheduled to open on December 6, 2025. For updates visit the Fondazione Prada site.