Paris-born conceptual artist Sophie Calle is recognised for her works that utilise narrative, photography, text, and video in provocative examinations of human life and experience.
Read MoreAfter finishing secondary school, Calle spent seven years travelling through China, the United States, and Mexico. Her artistic practice saw its beginnings in the late 1970s upon her return to Paris, where she began pursuing photography, and followed strangers in the city to familiarise herself with the place after her long absence.
An orchestrator of situations and 'private games', Sophie Calle's artworks unpack the dichotomies of personal and public, reality and fiction, and art and life in her ongoing unfolding and revisiting of stories.
In particular, she is recognised for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives.
For Suite Vénitienne (Venetian Suite) (1980—1994), Calle followed a man she encountered briefly in Paris, referred to as Henri B. Documenting her journey in black-and-white photographs, maps, and texts, Calle shadows Henri B. all the way to Venice, and back to Paris. Later iterations of the work saw the artist re-present the journey in a confessional sound installation and a text borrowing the physical and narrative format of a detective casebook.
The elaboration of chance events extends to The Address Book (1983), which began when Calle found an address book on the street, belonging to a man named Pierre. Treating her finding as a quest to get to know Pierre through the contacts listed in his address book, Calle documented this process in interviews, personal commentary, and photographs, and published a series of articles in the newspaper Libération.
The events and interactions of Calle's early practice are characteristic of her oeuvre as a whole, with surveillance, voyeurism, and narrative used as compelling and sometimes controversial devices through which to explore intimacy and human experience. Calle's practice has also been seen to align with the Oulipo French literary movement of the 1960s, in which constraints are sought to generate new structures and methods of writing.
In a conversation with Catherine Shaw for Ocula Magazine, Calle states: 'I am an artist trying to provocate through different situations, to use them as a tool in order to make a work of art. Sometimes it is through using life and text or images. I have a tendency to work with quite arbitrary situations.'
Calle's storytelling has oftentimes examined personal events in the artist's own life. When Calle represented France in the 2007 Venice Biennale, she presented Take Care of Yourself (2007), where she asked over a hundred women to analyse a break up email to Calle from her former partner, with the work's title taken from the email's closing line. The installation itself reveals the various interpretations of the email—interpretive dance, legal annotations, performative responses, musical translations, and spelling and grammar corrections, amongst others.
In her project Rachel, Monique, which was published as a book in 2017, Calle processes the death of her mother through diary excerpts, narrrative storytelling, and photographs. These somewhat obsessive, performative exercises in processing intimate loss and grief operate as a cathartic outlet for the artist, while establishing an affinity with her audience through the sharing of universal experiences.
Calle is known to appropriate distinct formats such as the documentary, forensic report, or genre novel, and chooses her mediums based on what she views as the most effective way to communicate the outcomes of an event she has facilitated. Voir la mer (2011) loosely borrows from the documentary portrait convention, comprising a series of video portraits which capture the reactions of residents of Istanbul as they see the ocean for the first time.
Though her practice can be seen to have a sociological or anthropological dimension, Calle states her work is not produced for sociological reasons, but for artistic reasons. For Voir la mer, Calle begins with shots of the residents' backs, leaving their initial reactions private before they face the camera. In this sense, Calle complicates the boundaries of chance and control, authorship and integrity, while nevertheless revealing poignant moments of her subjects' experience.
Calle has lectured at institutions including Mills College, Oakland; University of California, San Diego; and the European Graduate School, Switzerland.
Calle was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award for photography in 2010. In 2017, she was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. In the same year, the artist received the International Center of Photography's Infinity Award for Art. In 2019, Calle received an honorary fellowship and Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society.
Calle's work is held in collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Hasselblad Foundation, Göteborg; The National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon; and MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland.
Sophie Calle is represented in numerous solo and group exhibitions globally, and has been the subject of many important institutional shows.
Select solo exhibitions include What Remains, Kunstmuseum, Ravensburg (2020); Because, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Regard incertain, Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; Un certain regard, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2019); Cuídese mucho, Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile (2019); Exquisite pain, Hara Museum, Tokyo (2019); Parce que, Koyanagi Gallery, Tokyo (2019); Sophie Calle - l'Hôtel / Voir La Mer, Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich (2018); Sophie Calle, Perrotin, Paris (2018); Beau doublé, Monsieur le marquis ! Sophie Calle et son invitée Serena Carone, Musée de la Chasse, Paris (2017); Missing, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco (2017); Histoires vraies, Théâtre Liberté, Toulon (2016); and For the Last and First Time, Nagasaki Prefactural Art Museum (2016).
M'as-tu vue, a significant survey exhibition of Calle's work, was held at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2003 and toured to The Ludwig Forum for International Art, Aachen and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin in 2004.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2021
