EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

FATA MORGANA: UNDER THE WRONG ASSUMPTIONS

JENS HOFFMANN

January 27, 2026

A mirage is not a hallucination but a misalignment, light bending under conditions we fail to register. “Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible” operates in that same register, tracing the moment when familiar explanatory systems falter and private cosmologies rush in to take their place. Moving through the exhibition assembled by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini, one enters a climate rather than a thesis, a field of belief where the invisible is not mystification but labor, conviction, and necessity.

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I first thought about mirages just outside Palazzo Morando in Milan. The surrounding luxury stores, offering their assurances to the prosperous, seemed to operate under different atmospheric conditions. The light around them felt arranged, as if it had been trained to behave. A fata morgana is not a hallucination. It is a misalignment, air layers at different temperatures bending light, rearranging distance, making what exists elsewhere appear suddenly, impossibly near. The illusion is not false. It is conditional. You are not seeing something that is not there. You are seeing something under the wrong assumptions.

It is the quiet premise of Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible, the exhibition produced by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and assembled by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini. This is not an exhibition about belief as superstition. It is not the occult as spectacle. It is about the moment when the frameworks that usually explain the world fail, and other systems, fragile and private and often improvised, move in to carry the weight.

Gioni has long moved through the borderlands where belief and image blur, from his vast Il Palazzo Enciclopedico at the 2013 Venice Biennale to The Keeper at the New Museum in 2016 and many other exhibitions that treated private cosmologies as forms of knowledge rather than evidence of drift. Birnbaum approaches the invisible from another direction, shaped by his years at Portikus and later at the Moderna Museet, and by his sustained fascination with the spiritual currents that run through art. His 2009 Venice Biennale exhibition Making Worlds, built around the idea of expanded worlds and unexpected forms of attention, already carried the sense that perception might have other registers available to it. It suggested, quietly and without insistence, that the visible world is only one version of the story, and not necessarily the most reliable one. Papini joins them with a sensibility shaped by projects that treat territory, community, and long-duration public art as laboratories for private cosmologies, an approach visible from her work on The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani in 2022, where she helped construct the exhibition’s intricate ecosystem of narratives and thresholds.

Jill Mulleady, Young Roman, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York. © Jill Mulleady

I am wary of exhibitions that announce themselves as correctives. They tend to be neat in ways that history never is. Fata Morgana is not neat. It accumulates instead of arguing. It circles something that refuses to be clarified, as though explanation itself would betray the material.

The first thing one notices is what the exhibition refuses. There is no ritualistic hush, no suggestion that revelation happens only in the half light. The invisible here is not a performance of mystery. It appears in daylight, embedded in the common surfaces of experience, in diagrams, notebooks, messages, photographs, letters, and paintings made without any expectation that they would ever be looked at by another person. In this exhibition, the invisible is not transcendence. It is labor. It is the ongoing attempt to impose structure on experiences that arrive uninvited, the voices and intuitions and sensations that disrupt the order of things and insist on their own internal sequence. These works resist interpretation not because they are obscure but because they were never meant to be interpreted. They were meant to work.

This is where Fata Morgana separates itself from the contemporary exhibition economy. We live with art that anticipates explanation, that moves toward circulation, that arrives already flattened into content. These works do not circulate easily. They require proximity. They require time. They require a tolerance for not knowing.

Andra Ursuţa. Courtesy the artist, David Zwirner and Ramiken, New York. © Andra Ursuţa

There is a word that sits unspoken over the exhibition: mythology. Not myth as story, but myth as internal architecture, the sealed structure a life builds for itself when no shared structure is adequate. The great Swiss exhibition maker Harald Szeemann, who came of age in the old European museum world and then quietly rewired it from the inside, understood this better than most. He had broken with Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 after his exhibition When Attitudes Become Form unsettled nearly everything around it, and by the mid-1970s he was speaking of individual mythologies, a term he introduced in documenta 5 in 1972 to describe artists whose internal systems were so complete that no institutional language could absorb them. He knew that some lives produce their own weather, and that the weather is the work.

Fata Morgana takes this logic seriously. The figures gathered here do not form a school. They do not debate or influence one another. They operate as distinct climates. You can photograph the objects they made, but not the belief that required them.

The exhibition’s title reaches back to André Breton, and appropriately so. Breton’s poem Fata Morgana was written in a moment of collapse, exile, and disillusion. Surrealism was never born from ornament but from the failure of reason, the recognition that rational systems had produced war and bureaucracy and extermination. Something else had to be tried. Breton understood this as an ethical position. Fata Morgana the exhibition understands it too. The invisible returns whenever the visible world becomes intolerable. This is why the show does not feel nostalgic. It does not mourn a lost age of belief. It describes a recurring condition, the moments when explanation burns out and other forms of knowledge rush in.

Hilma af Klint embodies this tension with unusual clarity. Her canonization has been swift, almost eager, as if museums needed a missing chapter and chose her to fill it. Here she is not presented as the pioneer we have retroactively wished her to be. She appears instead as she was, a medium working under instruction, producing images addressed to a future she believed she would never see. These were not artworks waiting for an audience. They were messages waiting for a receiver. Canonization often neutralizes urgency. Fata Morgana refuses to neutralize af Klint. Her belief remains intact.

Diego Marcon, La Gola, 2024. Courtesy the artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York. © Diego Marcon

Emma Kunz tests the boundaries of art even more severely. Her drawings were diagnostic instruments for healing, not compositions for viewing. Encountering them in a museum produces a quiet disorientation. They do not invite looking. They do not reward it. They sit with complete indifference. This indifference is not resistance. It is fidelity to the world that produced them. Kunz did not need art. Art needed her.

Around them appear a constellation of figures who constructed their own cosmologies because the available ones were insufficient. Georgiana Houghton received instructions from spirits with names that seem too ornate to invent. Her watercolors are not expressions. They are conduits. Augustin Lesage and Fleury Joseph Crépin worked with the precision of civil servants recording the infrastructure of an unseen realm. Their paintings behave like plans for structures already built elsewhere.

Henri Michaux’s ink revelations feel like the residue of an encounter with forces that do not respect the body. Hélène Smith, born Catherine-Elise Müller, composed an entire Martian language and insisted she had traveled beyond Earth. The validity of the claim is beside the point. The world she built made sense to her when the visible world did not.

Other artists approached the invisible through violence or compulsion. Carol Rama’s works transform psychic rupture into imagery that feels ceremonial without ever becoming orderly. Unica Zürn’s drawings give form to obsession as if it were a language. Adolf Wölfli and Ferdinand Cheval constructed worlds outward and inward at once—Wölfli through paper and repetition, Cheval through stone and exhaustion. Reading their works as biography misses the point. They are not stories. They are systems.

Hilma af Klint, Primordial Chaos, The WU/Rose Series, Group 1, 1906–7. Courtesy Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm

Women recur throughout the exhibition not because the curators have made a gesture but because the material demands it. Minnie Evans, with her botanical revelations, Sister Gertrude Morgan, with her painted scriptures, Marian Spore Bush, painting in total darkness under trance conditions, Georgiana Houghton, recording the syntax of the beyond—these women were not waiting for recognition. They were operating in zones where recognition was irrelevant.

Film appears here in the same register of necessity. Maya Deren’s choreographies of the inner self, Germaine Dulac’s sensorial abstractions, and Kenneth Anger’s esoteric charge all suggest that cinema can behave as an instrument rather than an entertainment. Their films do not describe altered states. They induce them.

Some figures complicate the idea of belief through performance. Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Lee Miller, and Claude Cahun treated identity as a flexible surface, the self as apparition. Their presence reminds us that invisibility is not always metaphysical. It can be strategic. It can be protective. It can be a form of refusal.

Dominique Fung. Courtesy the artist and MASSIMODECARLO, Milan

The contemporary artists in the exhibition approach these concerns without irony. Chiara Fumai refuses the safe distance of commentary. She inhabits belief. Goshka Macuga arranges archives into speculative histories that behave like séances. Jill Mulleady paints scenes already charged with the memory of something not fully present. Marianna Simnett, Diego Marcon, and Andra Ursuţa each operate at the uncertain meeting point of interior and exterior pressures, where experience does not distinguish between what is chosen and what seizes a person.

Even the artists at the edge of this history seem governed by private systems. Kerstin Brätsch with her molten surfaces, Cecilia Edefalk repeating apparitions until they become events, Rosemarie Trockel letting objects hold meaning without clarifying it. Their work resembles ritual even when it declines the name.

Then there are the ones who tilt the room. James Tilly Matthews with his Air Loom paranoia. Emma Jung navigating psychic maps that were not entirely her own. Eusapia Palladino performing danger around credibility as if credibility itself were the volatile material.

Pierre Klossowski, Collezione Bilinelli, Milano. © Pierre Klossowski, by SIAE 2025

The exhibition publication tries to render all of this in order, although the biographies, written by artificial intelligence (a fata morgana in its own right), hover with an unmistakable gloss of vacancy, as if the system describing these lives has no idea why they mattered. The decision to enlist a machine here is curious, almost perverse. These artists built intricate internal architectures; the catalogue offers, in return, a language that has no interior at all. Yet the mismatch is revealing. It underscores how poorly contemporary tools—efficient, extractive, unburdened by belief—grasp the fragile infrastructures of conviction that shaped these lives. If anything, the dissonance confirms the exhibition’s premise: that some forms of knowledge cannot be automated without disappearing. Taken together, the artists in Fata Morgana form a climate, a pressure system, and a reminder that visibility dissolves under certain conditions and that alternate modes of orientation appear in its place. These works are not explanations. They are instruments. Antennae. Survival apparatuses.

Consequently, the exhibition does not resolve contradictions. It allows them to remain. It refuses to turn belief into aesthetic effect, or into pathology. It leaves the gaps intact because the gaps are part of the truth.

By the time I stepped back into the street, the idea of the mirage had shifted. A fata morgana is not a lie the air tells the eye. It is a reminder that perception depends on conditions, and that certainty is always provisional. This exhibition does not ask us to believe in the invisible. It asks us to recognize how often belief has been the only possible response to historical pressure. It asks us to consider art not as expression or communication but as infrastructure, a structure built to withstand forces that do not announce themselves in advance.

In a culture caught in an endless loop of reference, where originality has become a matter of recombination, Fata Morgana offers something unfashionable, namely the quiet, unsettling possibility that art still begins, sometimes, with conviction so complete that it does not need to be shared. That possibility feels fragile. It may even feel dangerous. Which is precisely why it matters now.

Chiara Camoni, Collezione DeArte, Venezia, courtesy SpazioA, Pistoia / Cecilia Edefalk, courtesy the artist

It also matters because the political climate has grown inhospitable to interiority. We live in an era that demands legibility, where every gesture is expected to disclose its purpose, every artwork to declare its alignment, every position to find its place on a spectrum already exhausted by use. Fata Morgana resists this demand. It proposes that not all structures of meaning are public facing. That private cosmologies, however provisional or eccentric, can function as forms of resistance in a culture that increasingly treats opacity as a threat. The exhibition’s refusal to translate belief into policy, its refusal to render the invisible into a program, is not avoidance. It is an insistence that some kinds of knowledge cannot be administered, instrumentalized, or converted into proof. In a moment defined by surveillance-level transparency and the weaponization of visibility, this insistence becomes political in the oldest sense: It protects the conditions under which a person might still think privately, act obscurely, or build a world without first asking permission.

Jens Hoffmann continues to be a stranger everywhere.

Cover image: Goshka Macuga, Madame Blavatsky, 2007. Collection Valeria and Gregorio Napoleone, London. © Goshka Macuga, by SIAE 2025

All images: Fata Morgana: memorie dall'invisibile (Fata Morgana: Memories of the Invisible), 2025. Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, photos by Roberto Marossi