Alexandre Singh, Assembly Instruction (The Pledge: Alfredo Arias) (detail), 2011, pencil on forty-seven ink-jet prints, dimensions variable.
Alexandre Singh
Galerie Art: Concept
The 2006 film based on British novelist Christopher Priest’s book The Prestige (1995) identifies three key moments of a magic trick: the pledge, when an object is presented; the “turn,” when that object is “disappeared”; and the prestige, the moment it reappears—the quarter drawn from a child’s ear, the rabbit pulled out of a hat. Palais de Tokyo director Marc-Olivier Wahler asked artist Alexandre Singh, versed in storytelling and performance, to consider the first of these, the magician’s pledge, for the September 2011 issue of the institution’s magazine, PALAIS/. Granted carte blanche, Singh took the pages of the publication as a stage, presenting—in the form of theater scripts illustrated with his drawings and collages—his conversations with seven thinkers: theater director Alfredo Arias, artist Simon Fujiwara, filmmaker Michel Gondry, Proust scholar Donatien
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