A mirage is strange. It is strange and disturbing. Something appears that irritates us. It astonishes us. We see something that we can not properly classify. Something that eludes the usual, or everyday, what we know, in a strange way.

In her work Fata Morgana or the Search for it, Kathrin Horsch embarks on a research trip to the North Sea in order to track down precisely this peculiarity. However, the point in time she sets her sights on for her research work is quite contradictory to a scientific approach. Kathrin Horsch chooses the darkest and stormiest month of November, the period in which the appearance of a mirage is actually impossible.
Although she cannot encounter the strange in this particular, this special form of a mirage, Kathrin Horsch nevertheless sets out in search of it and confronts us with the fact that this ‚One‘, what she is looking for, can be anything. That this ‚one‘, which irritates us and astonishes us, is at the same time everything we come into contact with.
The impossibility for this, to find a mirage and still look for it, opens the view on what remains. To what remains when even a last remnant of knowledge, when the hold that the mirage promises us dissolves. When we can no longer say that what irritates us is something specific, something strange, a mirage. Kathrin Horsch opens the view to what remains when this certainty does not exist. When we cannot explain what irritates us, what eludes our experience, our conviction, or our imagination. When it remains strange to us, when we can no longer answer the question of what it is that irritates us.
It is precisely this residue of knowledge, this hold that we assure ourselves of through the mirage, that disappears in Kathrin Horsch’s hopeless search. It is impossible to get in touch with the irritation. It does not work. Instead, however, on Kathrin Horsch’s search we enter we get in contact with ourselves. The movements that Kathrin Horsch presents to us are movements that allow us to get closer to ourselves.
Kathrin Horsch creates situations within which we come into contact. One does not only look at, or see the events exposed by Kathrin Horsch in various videos, one feels them. One is in contact with the things and feels how they themselves are in contact with each other. There is nothing more than this contact. There is no resolution. Every determination or fixation is always interrupted by something.
Everything remains in contact: Again the door bangs next to the blue wall, suddenly the car is diverted, ever further the wind blows the sand around. Where something presents itself, it disappears at the same moment and in the same way in which it appears. Just as the crevice begins to form on the white wall, it disappears. Just as the sand moves towards something, the wind keeps interfering with every manifestation of the same. Every time.
But always there is something. Always there is something between the one and the other. Always there is something between what we see and us.
Always something makes itself noticeable. Draws our attention to itself.
Where we had only paid attention to the column, suddenly the white wall makes itself noticeable. Only now do we feel that we have been exposed to the sound of the wind all along. There is always something that draws us in, even though nothing is happening. The door slams open and closed. The column moves back and forth. Still, it’s not clear what’s coming next. Not clear what turn will take place. Immersed in the movement of the sand, we are suddenly irritated by the whistling of the wind.We are touched by the car that does not lose sight of its goal and is all alone.
Kathrin Horsch does not present us with anything specific in her search for the mirage.we do not see anything that we could look at from a distance, that we could look at from the outside. Quite the opposite. In Kathrin Horsch’s search for the mirage, the strange is released from our imagination. It suddenly shows up everywhere. Whenever we get close to something, whenever we come into contact with it, it always comes between us.