Magic Show

Description:

Rosamunde Bordo’s solo exhibition Magic Show brought together new metal-cast, woodworked, blown glass, and sewn objects, alongside videoworks. These forms resemble clues or magical instruments, positioning the figures of the detective and the magician as corresponding frameworks for making meaning through intuition and association, iteration, and sleight of hand.

Magic Show built on Bordo’s ongoing project The Denise File (2018–), an interdisciplinary work of serial detective fiction written through physical space and material form. The Denise File evolved from Bordo’s interaction with a collection of found postcards addressed to a woman named Denise. With each chapter, Bordo responds by materializing objects, sourcing found items, and constructing installations. Paradoxically, through this, Denise becomes increasingly real, even as the same process of artistic invention renders her ever more fictive.

In Magic Show, ritual and investigation unfolded in parallel. The works function as talismans holding material, linguistic, and supernatural resonances, while also acting as evidence of Denise’s existence. Together, they constituted the dispersed ingredients for a “potion” within the gallery space, one that corresponded and communed with Denise, conjuring her presence.

Working across craft- and time-based processes, Bordo approaches material practices as a reciprocal action between inner reality and the external environment. By learning to work with her hands in new ways, Bordo uncovers further aspects of the enigmatic Denise, who continues to emerge through tactile forms. Drawing on esoteric knowledge traditions, the works operate as conduits for sympathetic transference—where objects and their traces act upon one another, and upon the viewer, across distance. In doing so, relationships between part and whole, microcosm and macrocosm, come into focus, opening onto speculative encounters extending beyond empirical perception.

A commissioned text by Lara Mimosa Montes titled “M / A / G / I / C S-P-E-L-L” (2026) accompanied the exhibition.

Curated by Kiel Torres.

Presented with support from the Audain Foundation. 

Documents:

• Rosamunde Bordo: Magic Show exhibition brochure (2026). Text by Lara Mimosa Montes.