Overview

Fondazione Prada presents “Dash,” a new multimedia project by Chinese artist Cao Fei, at its Milan headquarters from April 9 to September 28, 2026. The exhibition occupies the ground floor and first floor of the Podium, Fondazione Prada’s central exhibition building designed by OMA. It is produced by Fondazione Prada in close collaboration with the artist and represents the culmination of three years of fieldwork across southern and northwestern China and Southeast Asia.

The title refers to the high-frequency sound of a drone in flight: that precise, autonomous buzz of a machine operating at the edge of human grasp. Cao Fei positions this sound as the sonic signature of a technological moment in which the tools of agriculture, and by extension of subsistence itself, are being fundamentally reorganised by automation, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing systems. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by Fondazione Prada, with a foreword by Miuccia Prada, a conversation between Cao Fei and Rem Koolhaas, a science fiction story by the artist, and essays by scholars, curators, and experts.

Focus

Dash examines smart agriculture not as a solution to planetary crisis but as a dense field of contradictions, where automation promises efficiency while quietly rewriting labour, memory, and the relationship between humans and land. The exhibition’s conceptual framework is organised around a diagram Cao Fei calls CHT Triad: Cosmos, Human, Technics, which proposes a non-hierarchical relationship in which technology is a co-author of human becoming rather than a tool in human hands.

The project builds on Cao Fei’s two-decade inquiry into technological modernity’s effects on Chinese society, moving from factories and logistics networks (as in “Whose Utopia,” 2006, and “Asia One,” 2018) to agriculture, the oldest and most foundational form of human relationship with land. The shift is not merely thematic. Smart farming is among the most consequential technological transformations of this century, affecting food security, land use, labour markets, ecological systems, and the cultural fabric of rural communities globally, yet it has been almost entirely absent from contemporary art discourse.

Cao Fei’s central provocation is drawn from an observation at a Chinese super farm in 2023: there were virtually no humans in the fields. In their place were drones, autonomous vehicles, and automated irrigation and harvesting systems. That condition, she notes, is not a future projection but an already existing present.

Here, satellite positioning systems converse with ritual geographies; artificial intelligence and traditional experience train one another; historical images and sensor signals generate visual resonance.
Cao Fei, Exhibition Statement, 2026

Exhibition Structure

Ground Floor: The Agricultural Environment

The ground floor constructs a full-scale rural environment inside the Podium. A grain warehouse functions as a cinema screening the eponymous two-channel video “Dash” (47 min.). A temple built from fertilizer sacks houses three-channel video “The Birth,” which documents the everyday reverence farmers across Southeast Asia extend to their agricultural drones, offering flowers, incense, and ceremonies once reserved for rain deities. A new farmer’s training station and a banana plantation surrounded by solar panels, smart agricultural machinery, and autonomous vehicles complete the floor. The installation structures were developed by Small Production; banners and cushions were designed by Xiang Gao.

The temple built from industrial waste packaging is the exhibition’s most precise formal decision: sacred and industrial occupy the same physical object. The videos inside show that this is not ironic or critical from a distance but an accurate description of lived agricultural reality in regions where harvests determine survival.

First Floor: Research and Archive

The first floor shifts from immersive environment to research archive. Documentary films, photographs, propaganda posters from the founding decades of the People’s Republic of China (1949 to 1980s), scientific and educational slides from the Reform and Opening-up era (1978 onwards), and Chinese folk records titled “Busy Farming” situate Cao Fei’s investigation within a broader historical and ideological context.

“Land Ceremony,” which greets visitors on this floor, makes the continuity between ancient ritual and technological present physical: constructed from local Lombard rice and traditional folk materials decorated with drone components, it draws directly on the ancient Chinese “rice dragon” ritual. The argument of the floor is that China’s current investment in agricultural technology is not a rupture from its history but a continuation of it.

Key Works

Catalogue and Conversations

The exhibition catalogue is designed by graphic artist Evi O and published by Fondazione Prada. It includes an introduction by Miuccia Prada; a conversation between Cao Fei and Rem Koolhaas, whose OMA has developed extensive research on countryside since 2012; a science fiction story by Cao Fei; and essays and interviews with scholars, curators, and experts. The Koolhaas conversation is a significant pairing: his countryside research and the broader OMA investigation of rural land transformation provide a direct intellectual counterpart to Cao Fei’s fieldwork methodology.

Audience

The exhibition is open to the general public at Fondazione Prada’s Milan venue. It addresses audiences spanning contemporary art, architecture, design research, technology studies, and agricultural policy. Its five-month run gives it an extended presence in Milan’s cultural calendar, overlapping with the city’s major design and architecture events in spring and summer 2026.

Event Details