EVENT: CAO FEI DASH (9 APRIL – 28 SEPTEMBER 2026, MILAN, ITALY)
Cao Fei Dash
April 9–September 28, 2026
Largo Isarco, 2 Milan, 20139 Italy
Cao Fei’s Dash, opening at Fondazione Prada on 9 April 2026, arrives wrapped in the rhetoric of innovation but seems more interested in what technological progress leaves behind: displaced knowledge, altered perception, and new rituals of dependence. Developed over three years of research across farms in China and Southeast Asia, the exhibition examines smart agriculture not as a sleek solution to planetary crisis but as a dense field of contradictions, where automation promises efficiency while quietly rewriting labour, memory, and the relation between humans and land.
This is familiar terrain for Cao Fei, though the setting has changed. For more than two decades, her work has tracked the psychic and social effects of technological modernity, moving through factories, logistics networks, virtual cities, and other engineered environments where aspiration and alienation are difficult to separate. If Whose Utopia turned to industrial labour and Asia One to the automated warehouse, Dash shifts attention to the farm as another operational zone, increasingly formatted by drones, sensors, remote imaging, and algorithmic management. Agriculture appears here as an infrastructure under conversion.
At Fondazione Prada’s Podium, Cao Fei translates that condition into an installation that risks overload but may well thrive on it. A grain warehouse, a temple-like structure, a “new farmer station”, a small banana plantation, solar panels, agritech equipment, video screens: the exhibition adopts the syntax of an engineered environment rather than the neutrality of the white cube. The new two-channel film Dash, produced for the occasion, reportedly focuses on the mutual calibration of bodies and machines, while The Birth draws from the everyday worship of drones in parts of Southeast Asia, where agricultural technology becomes folded back into older structures of devotion. Elsewhere, Dash-180c places viewers inside the perspective of a discarded drone, turning virtual reality into a form of technical afterlife.
That last gesture is especially telling. Cao Fei has long understood that contemporary subjectivity is inseparable from mediation, simulation, and role-play. What distinguishes Dash is that it brings these concerns into contact with a domain still routinely burdened by fantasies of authenticity, continuity, and rootedness. Her exhibition does not appear interested in preserving such myths. Instead, it treats the rural as a site where computation, extraction, belief, and survival now collide in unusually explicit ways. Even the project’s language of archaeology is revealing: this is not an ode to the future, but a survey of ruins in advance.
The archival material on the first floor — documentaries, interviews, photographs, posters, books, scientific slides — seems designed to thicken that sense of historical pressure. By tracing narratives of Chinese agriculture from the Mao era through reform and into the present, Dash situates smart farming within a much longer history of state planning, modernisation, and ideological image-making. That matters. Without this historical dimension, the exhibition could easily lapse into the familiar contemporary-art script in which technology is treated as either menace or marvel. Cao Fei appears to want something harder to stabilise: a view of automation as a lived condition, unevenly absorbed into local cultures, economic systems, and symbolic worlds.
For readers attuned to game cultures, immersive media, and digital art, Dash may prove particularly resonant. Its use of VR and machine perspective does not simply decorate a documentary inquiry; it points to the extent to which agriculture itself has become a visualised, modelled, and remotely managed environment. The field is now read through interfaces: perception is delegated and judgment is distributed across systems. In that sense, Cao Fei’s exhibition speaks to a broader transformation well beyond farming: the expansion of technical vision into domains once imagined to lie outside it.
In Milan, Dash is presented as a study of how intelligence (human, machinic, institutional) is reorganising the terms of subsistence. Cao Fei has rarely been a didactic artist, and that remains one of her advantages. She knows that systems are most revealing not when they announce themselves, but when they begin to feel ordinary.