- Jan 15
- 3 min read
Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible” at Palazzo Morando
La Gola, 2024 [Still] digital video transferred from 35mm film CGI animation, color, sound
Duration: 22 min 22 sec © Diego Marcon Courtesy the Artist; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York; Kunstverein Hamburg; Kunsthalle Wien; and Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for BIM ’24
The exhibition “Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible” at Palazzo Morando has just concluded and stands as one of the most fascinating and significant of 2025. It invites traversal rather than mere visitation. “Fata Morgana: Memories from the Invisible,” at Palazzo Morando, activates an energetic field. It is an atlas of the beyond, a living archive of images that receive, channel, and transmit the world. Art here functions as a sensitive technology, a mode of connection. Conceived and produced by the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi and curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum, and Marta Papini, the exhibition arises from a deep dialogue with its hosting space.
Palazzo Morando serves as a true conceptual accelerator. Once home to Countess Lydia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini—collector of esoteric, spiritualist, and “proscribed” knowledge—the palace offers the ideal threshold for a project that merges rational knowledge with intuitive wisdom, archive with vision, history with trance.
The title evokes Fata Morgana, an ambiguous sorceress and liminal figure, as well as André Breton’s visionary poem of 1940, written in exile. In both cases, it is a revealing territory. The exhibition embraces this instability as a curatorial method. It listens.
The over two hundred works on display—paintings, films, photographs, ritual objects, diagrams, documents, and apparitions—create a constellation of mediums, mystics, visionaries, outsiders, contemporary female and male artists who, from the nineteenth century to today, have sought to give form to the formless. It is a network. A system of transmissions.
At the heart of the journey stands the extraordinary group of sixteen paintings by Hilma af Klint, presented for the first time in Italy in such breadth. Here, abstraction arises as a response to a received mandate. Her canvases are cosmic interfaces. In the era of artificial intelligence and generative algorithms, they stand as prototypes of post-authorial art, with the artist as antenna, medium, node of a vast network.
Surrounding this center are radical figures: Georgiana Houghton, Annie Besant, Emma Kunz, Eusapia Palladino, Maya Deren, Carol Rama, Chiara Fumai, Judy Chicago, Kerstin Brätsch, Marianna Simnett. This powerful female genealogy rewrites the history of art as a history of sensitive bodies, altered states, and practices of listening. A counter-history where knowledge moves through vulnerability, trance, and imagination.
In Fata Morgana, the invisible serves as a critical tool. In a present saturated with images, deepfakes, and simulations, the exhibition poses an urgent question: what if we are all mediums—receivers and transmitters of flows, data, and visions? And what if art, like AI, builds possible worlds rather than merely producing content?
Now that Fata Morgana has concluded, what remains is what every truly transformative experience leaves behind: a shift in perspective. The exhibition does not ask for belief. It asks for suspension. For remaining in doubt. For inhabiting the interval. It does not offer answers, but opens doors. And once crossed, going back is no longer an option.
by Veronica Mazziotta
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