Mona Hatoum’s Unstable World Map Is a Lesson in How Maps Make Power

Reported Explainer | Visual-Culture Analysis

Image disclosure: This is an original editorial illustration, not a documentary photograph, artwork reproduction or exhibition view.

At Fondazione Prada, a world assembled from loose red glass spheres makes projection, borders and the authority of a map newly difficult to take for granted.

This records-based analysis draws on exhibition documents, cartography research, independent criticism and programme records. It does not claim firsthand attendance or offer an on-site review.

14 October 2026 — Milan

Mona Hatoum’s Over, under and in between is in its final month at Fondazione Prada in Milan, where it remains open in the Cisterna through 9 November. At its centre is Map (red): more than 30,000 translucent red glass balls lie loose across a concrete floor in the form of a world map. Continents are present; political and geographical borders are absent. The image follows the Gall–Peters projection rather than the Mercator projection familiar from many classroom and wall maps. [1]

This is not a correction pinned to a wall. It is a planet made granular, seductive and precarious. The material denies the map’s usual promise: that a clean line, standard scale and stable surface can make a troubled world comprehensible. In the final weeks of a project that moves from a glass web overhead to a floor-bound map and then a shuddering grid, Hatoum’s proposition is not that one projection redeems another. It is that every map is a decision about power.

The timing gives the work an added charge. As a public increasingly encounters maps not only in atlases but in navigation platforms, news graphics and the administrative imagery of borders, the choices embedded in representation can feel both invisible and consequential. Hatoum does not offer a technical remedy for that condition. She slows it down. Her map asks what has to be enlarged, reduced, omitted or made to look natural before the world can be pictured at all.

The politics inside a projection

The essential fact is technical. A sphere cannot be flattened without distortion: a mapmaker can privilege area, direction, distance or shape, but cannot preserve all four across the whole Earth. Mercator, devised for navigation, lets a straight line indicate true direction while greatly enlarging area toward the poles. [2] Gall–Peters preserves relative area, making Africa, South America and Southeast Asia register at a scale many viewers accustomed to Mercator-style maps find unfamiliar.

Yet “more accurate” requires care. Gall–Peters preserves area by accepting conspicuous distortion of shape. The University of Wisconsin’s State Cartographer describes the trade-off plainly: conformal and equal-area projections answer different needs, and no projection is without compromise. [3] The name also compresses a history: James Gall first presented the projection in 1855; Arno Peters popularised it in 1973. [7] The qualification is the hinge of Hatoum’s work. A map that corrects one hierarchy of size can still impose a visual order of another kind.

Fondazione Prada frames the projection as an answer to the Mercator’s diminution of regions in the Global South. [1] Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, writing in e-flux, takes the point further, reading Hatoum’s choice as a critique of an imperial world order and an opening onto the possibility of its redistribution. [4] What distinguishes Map (red) is that it makes size felt before it is argued. The work is neither data display nor a neutral substitute for the world.

That distinction is useful beyond the gallery. The old question of projection is sometimes presented as if cartographers were merely choosing between an honest image and a dishonest one. But a map is made for a purpose, addressed to an audience and furnished with conventions. Navigation, territory, property, extraction and education do not require the same kind of map, even when they borrow the same planetary outline. A reader can acknowledge Mercator’s navigational utility without treating the visual habits it has produced as politically innocent or universally suitable.

Maps help governments, schools, companies and publics convert terrain into legible territory. Critical-cartography scholars Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins identify mapping as entangled with nation-building, colonial power and territorial control, as well as with efforts to contest them. [5] A boundary can look settled in a diagram even where movement, jurisdiction, land and safety remain in dispute. Hatoum removes the lines; she does not imagine their consequences away.

A world underfoot, held at a distance

The work refuses the ordinary vertical posture of map-reading. Fondazione Prada describes a miniature world under the viewer’s body and calls the territory “loose and undefined.” [1] The reversal gives a person an unsettling magnitude: physically larger than the representation used to picture the planet, yet unable to command its unstable surface.

Red glass holds light and carries the charge of warning; thousands of discrete balls form continents without becoming fixed ground. The map proposes connection but not fusion. Nothing is cemented into a final arrangement. This is not an illustration of geopolitical instability. It is an attempt to give instability weight, reflection and scale. Its refusal of borders is therefore double-edged: it can prompt a critical look at the lines that organise political belonging, but it cannot make the unequal force of those lines disappear.

The tension is sharpened by the conditions under which a museum must show the work. The digital guide’s safety instruction applies to the adjacent motorised all of a quiver: visitors are told not to touch it and to hold children by the hand. [7] This is ordinary care, not a contradiction to be exposed. Yet it usefully describes the exhibition’s institutional logic. Danger appears as sensation, form and sound within a managed space, where access requires barriers, staff attention and rules. A museum can make precariousness palpable; it cannot responsibly reproduce its actual costs.

Natalie Weis’s review in The Brooklyn Rail names a related problem at Map (red) itself: a low cable barrier limits how closely viewers can move around the work, a formal and access decision that complicates its rhetoric of mobility. [6] Her larger objection is that the exhibition’s proliferating associations can grow diffuse. That criticism matters. Hatoum’s open symbolism can create room for multiple readings, but it may also blur the particular forces that make a border lethal or a migration route precarious.

The limit is productive if it is stated clearly. Map (red) is neither a documentary account of a single conflict nor a policy instrument. It offers no reassurance of mastery. Its question for the institution and public is whether symbolic unsettlement can lead outward: toward better historical literacy, more exact speech about borders, and attention to who has authority to draw them.

Biography without reduction

Hatoum was born in Beirut to a Palestinian family and has lived in London since 1975, after the outbreak of Lebanon’s civil war prevented her return from a visit to Britain, according to the exhibition leaflet. [7] That history belongs beside the recurrence of displacement, control and vulnerability in her work. It should not become a master key that turns every object into a stand-in for one people, nation or crisis.

Wilson-Goldie similarly notes Hatoum’s resistance to being fixed as a spokesperson. [4] The point corrects an art world tendency to demand transparent political testimony from artists marked by displacement. Map (red) proceeds through a more oblique art-historical language: Minimalist seriality, an altered cartographic convention and a precarious sculptural field. Its politics do not arrive as a caption.

The piece also belongs to a longer development in Hatoum’s practice rather than appearing as a sudden response to a single headline. Fondazione Prada’s guide connects it to floor-based works begun in the mid-1990s, and identifies the web, map and grid as recurring elements in her vocabulary. [7] Such recurrence matters. It lets the exhibition consider displacement and instability not as topical imagery but as formal problems: how a body is oriented, how a structure contains or excludes, and how a familiar object begins to threaten the person who relies on it.

The Cisterna as a pressure chamber

The Cisterna is not a generic white cube. Built in 1909 as storage tanks for the site’s former distillery, it supplies three high concrete rooms whose industrial history determines the project’s spatial grammar. [7] A hand-blown glass Web fills the entrance room; all of a quiver, a nine-level motorised grid, bends toward collapse and recovers in the last. The sequence moves from enclosure to orientation to construction: a net above the head, a world below the feet, then an architecture that will not hold still.

The chronology matters. Web and Map (red) are dated 2026, while all of a quiver dates to 2022, when Hatoum developed it for KINDL’s historic Kesselhaus in Berlin. Milan therefore brings a work shaped by one industrial volume into another, rather than presenting the three as a single newly made suite. [7] [10]

Here, architecture is neither backdrop nor atmosphere. The cistern’s scale lets the installations test three kinds of public relation. The web suspends a figure beneath a delicate system. The map makes territory an object of overview. The grid stages the fantasy that an engineered order can rise again unchanged. Together they revise the inherited language of Minimalism—serial units, industrial material, modular structures—by making its coolness bodily and vulnerable.

The venue’s mechanics are part of the picture. Fondazione Prada, created in 1993 by Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, is privately founded; Miuccia Prada remains President and Director. Its Milan programme, inaugurated in 2015, joins exhibitions to research, film, science, music, dance and education. [8] e-flux’s independent programme listing places Hatoum alongside Hito Steyerl, Cao Fei, Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, and the forthcoming Global Antiquity. [9]

That structure can sustain a project of this scale, with industrial volume, specialised glasswork and a long public run. Its accompanying Quaderno publication brings together texts by architect Theo Deutinger, architect Lina Ghotmeh and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster, an indication of the disciplines the institution asks the project to convene. [7] This is a serious interpretive apparatus, but it has a boundary. A foundation can commission an encounter with cartographic power; it cannot redraw a border, change a classroom map or alter the platforms through which most people navigate.

That boundary should not diminish the work’s public value. It names it. Art’s force here is to interrupt a habitual image and make its negotiations visible: between measurement and persuasion, safety and exposure, form and political consequence. The exhibition’s final motorised grid makes that point in architectural terms. It is a structure that must continually recompose itself, never arriving at a condition of secure permanence.

What this map asks readers to carry forward

Before 9 November, the useful approach is not to seek the one true world image. Attend instead to the Gall–Peters contours, the absent borders, the warning-red material and the floor’s refusal of a secure viewpoint. Notice how the Cisterna turns those choices into a sequence of bodily positions: beneath, above and in relation to an unstable frame.

Then look for the same decisions in an atlas, phone map or news graphic. What has been preserved? What has been enlarged? What appears settled because a line says it is? Who decides the terms on which a world becomes visible?

Hatoum does not settle those questions. She makes them harder to evade.

Sources & records

1. https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/mona-hatoum-over-under-and-in-between/?lang=en "Fondazione Prada: Mona Hatoum, Over, under and in between"

2. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-are-different-map-projections-used "U.S. Geological Survey: How are different map projections used?"

3. https://www.sco.wisc.edu/2026/09/08/un-advocates-for-new-world-map-projection/ "University of Wisconsin State Cartographer’s Office: UN Advocates for New World Map Projection"

4. https://www.e-flux.com/criticism/6782417/mona-hatoum-s-over-under-and-in-between "Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, e-flux Criticism: Mona Hatoum’s ‘Over, under and in between’"

5. https://kitchin.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/map-reader-power-2011.pdf "Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins, ‘Power and Politics of Mapping’ (2011)"

6. https://brooklynrail.org/2026/09/artseen/mona-hatoum-weis/ "Natalie Weis, The Brooklyn Rail: Mona Hatoum, Over, under and in between"

7. https://www.fondazioneprada.org/wp-content/uploads/Leaflet_digital_Mona-Hatoum_ENG.pdf "Fondazione Prada: Mona Hatoum—Over, under and in between digital leaflet"

8. https://www.fondazioneprada.org/mission/?lang=en "Fondazione Prada: Mission"

9. https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6785083/programme-2026 "e-flux: Fondazione Prada Programme 2026"

10. https://www.kindl-berlin.com/hatoum "KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art: Mona Hatoum, all of a quiver"