Mandrake a disparu — Espace Khiasma — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 22 → May 18, 2013

Through a reference to magic tricks, Mandrake’s disappearance creates a very particular sphere of illusion. Mandrake, a prime example of an “entertainment magician”, an agent operating magic, purposefully alludes to primitive cinema but also, in the framework of this exhibition, incarnates a space of complicity.

Illusion thus paradoxically becomes what makes things visible; the magic trick gives us a way of seeing on the borderline of perception and the magician becomes an intermediary accompanying the birth and disaperance of images. As a projectionist, he gives the spectator access to what is not yet present.

So what would it be, that magicianless magic imagined by the exhibition’s title? Maybe a way into a new order: one of simulation, where operator gives his place to mathematical calculations and where magic stops being a field of knowledge of the visible and becomes a strategy of deception.