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,