With her ingenious mix of fact and fiction, seriousness and playfulness, cool distance and unabashed intimacy, Sophie Calle stands as one of the most influential voices of contemporary art.
For five decades, Sophie Calle (born 1953) has been a leading figure in the visual arts with her original work that tackles the big questions of existence and human emotions in general – love, loss, guilt, fear, embarrassment, etc. – with warmth, incisive humour, poetry in a rigorous, conceptual mode of expression.
Sophie Calle
Her works often consist of a combination of photography and text. The registering sobriety that we associate with a photograph is combined with deeply personal narratives – the artist’s or others – that are both heartfelt, moving, messy, funny and ironic. In other words, the exact opposite of any kind of sober documentation. But Sophie Calle’s signature is precisely this field of tension between fact and fiction, between public and private, coolness and passion.
The exhibition, entitled Something Missing?, was created in close collaboration with Sophie Calle herself, and presented seven of the artist’s major series including a number of recent works. It comprised more than 300 individual parts – photographs, texts and videos – and was shown in the museum’s West Wing.
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The Blind
Among the works presented in this exhibition, was one of the artist's early works 'The Blind' from 1986, a new acquisition to the Louisiana collection. This work also represents an artistic interplay between word and image, fact and imagination, cultural cliché and something intimately personal.
Here Sophie Calle has asked 23 people, all of whom were born blind, what their image of “beauty” is. The question seems absurd, but the answers are as diverse as they are surprising and touching. While the concept of the work is quite simple and clear – as so often with Calle – it opens up big questions about cognition and image formation.
To See the Sea
One of the new series include 'Voir la mer' (Too See the Sea) from 2011. Here the artist has invited a group of residents of Istanbul, who despite being surrounded by the sea, had never seen it. She filmed their first time.
"...Once we were safely by the sea, I instructed them to take away their hands and look at it. Then, when they were ready – for some it was five minutes and for others 15 – they had to turn to me and let me look at those eyes that had just seen the sea.”
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Over the years, guests have been able to meet works by Sophie Calle in presentations of Louisiana’s collection, which includes several of her works. In 2010, the museum showed Take Care of Yourself, which focused on one of the artist’s major projects.
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Louisiana Channel is a non-profit website that provides culture to the Internet, extending beyond the museum’s own events. The Louisiana team produces videos about art and culture on an ongoing basis. New videos are posted at the site every week.
Videos on the arts, featuring the artists.
Watch interview with Sophie Calle in her home in Paris, created by Louisiana Channel in connection with the exhibition.
