A career-spanning survey of the adored French artist whose conceptual works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid.
This volume accompanies the eponymous show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures Calle’s astute probing into the human condition and reveals ways that her early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to create and share oneself. The presentation features photography, video, installations and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different mediums to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Organized into four thematic sections–“The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning”–the book takes a new approach to some of Calle’s most acclaimed works including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), while also weaving in understudied works including Cash Machine (1991-2003) and Unfinished (2005). The catalog further explores this new examination of Calle’s work with original writing by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D'Souza and Courtenay Finn. -Publisher