Sophie Calle

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Sophie Calle 2015

Sophie Calle (born October 9, 1953 in Paris ) is a French artist. Her work includes photography , installations and conceptual art .

Sophie Calle with Alexandra Cohen

life and work

Sophie Calle was born in Paris in 1953 as the daughter of the art dealer Robert Calle and the surgeon Monique Sindler. After their parents separated two years later, Calle grew up with her mother.

After working as a bartender and dancer, Sophie Calle went on trips in the 1970s that took her to Lebanon, Mexico and the USA for over seven years. In 1978, while staying in California, she began taking photos. In 1979 she returned to Paris and soon started her first art project: in order to get used to Paris again, she began following strangers. Dressed in a wig and raincoat and equipped with a 35mm camera and a notebook, she followed her “unknown city guide” through a city in which she felt lonely and strange. The result of their investigation was documented and exhibited on the basis of photos and written reports.

Finally, she invited 45 people - friends, acquaintances, strangers - to sleep in her bed and let her take their photos. Her first work, Die Schläfer (1979), was the result, the first publication of her "seemingly unbelievable, adventurous intrusions into their own and other people's privacy."

For the work Der Schatten she changed her perspective and in April 1981 asked her mother to hire a detective to shadow her and to investigate her own life as an artist. The detective's photos and report, as well as her own notes and additional photographs of a friend who in turn followed the detective, were then exhibited and published.

In July 1983, Sophie Calle found an address book and copied its pages before sending it back to the owner. She had decided to go to the people in the address book and use their stories to compose a portrait of the owner, whom she never met. The texts appeared from August 4 to September 2, 1983 in the series "L'Homme au carnet" in the daily newspaper Liberation . The publication of this successively emerging portrait caused a scandal. In 2019 the address book was translated into German ( ISBN 978-3-518-22510-3 ).

In the hotel project , Sophie Calle worked as a maid in a hotel in Venice, which enabled her to research the objects and documents of hotel guests. During the action Room with a View (2003), she spent the night in a bed on top of the Eiffel Tower and invited 28 people to read her bedtime stories to keep her awake.

The Center Pompidou put together a retrospective that could be seen from September 10th to December 13th, 2004 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau .

Her contribution to the French pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia in summer 2007 was closely related to her own private life. The message with which her partner, the French author Grégoire Bouillier , parted with her became the basis of the work Prenez soin de vous. Sophie Calle received the bad news by email and says she didn't know what to answer. The message ended with the sentence “Prenez soin de vous” (Eng. “Take care of yourself”). For her contribution in Venice she had the text of the separation e-mail interpreted by 107 women, including a judge, a fortune teller, a psychoanalyst and a Bharatanatyam dancer.

In 2002, Calle was awarded the internationally renowned SPECTRUM Prize for Photography from the Lower Saxony Foundation and her work was shown from June 30th to September 22nd, 2002 at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover . Sophie Calle was the model for the figure of Mary in the novel Leviathan by Paul Auster . In 2010 it was awarded the Swedish Hasselblad Foundation Award , which is presented by the Hasselblad Foundation and is endowed with 100,000 euros.

Sophie Calle lives and works in Malakoff near Paris and in New York.

Exhibitions

literature

  • Sophie Calle: The address book. Translated from the French by Sabine Erbrich . (Library Suhrkamp, ​​vol. 1510) Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-518-22510-3 .
  • Souvenirs de Berlin-Est . Actes Sud, Arles 1999, ISBN 2-7427-2602-0 .
  • Sophie Calle: Did you see me? Prestel Verlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-7913-3035-7 .
  • Sophie Calle: True stories . Translated from the French by Elke Bahr and Sebastian Viebahn. Prestel Verlag, Munich, Berlin, London, New York 2004, ISBN 3-7913-3262-7 .
  • Sophie Calle: I hate interviews . Interview with Fabian Stech on the occasion of the award of the Spectrum Prize 2002. In: Kunstforum . tape 162 , 2002, p. 210-218 .
  • Sophie Calle, Paul Auster : Double Game . Distributed Art Pub, New York City 2007, ISBN 978-1-933045-69-6 .
  • Angeli Janhsen : Sophie Calle . In: New Art as a Catalyst . Reimer Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-496-01459-1 , p. 29-38 .
  • Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier (eds.): 50 women artists you should know . Prestel, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , pp. 140-143 .
  • Ania Wroblewski: La vie des autres. Sophie Calle et Annie Ernaux , artistes hors-la-loi. Presses Universitaires Université de Montréal , 2016 ISBN 2760635325 (= Diss. Phil., Dept. of French Literature, 2013)

Web links

Commons : Sophie Calle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sophie Calle in the Munzinger archive . Retrieved July 17, 2018.
  2. ↑ Elke Heinemann: The drama of observing and being observed. A portrait of the French artist Sophie Calle on the occasion of the retrospective in the Sprengel Museum Hannover . In: NDR 3 . Texts and symbols, June 28, 2002, 7:05 p.m. - 7:25 p.m.
  3. ^ Sophie Calle: The Sleepers, 1980. Fotomuseum.ch.
  4. ↑ https://www.zeit.de/2008/26/Atelier-Calle-26/komplettansicht Accessed on November 24, 2019.
  5. ↑ a b c Martin-Gropius-Bau: Sophie Calle. Website of the Berliner Festspiele ( memento of October 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  6. ↑ Tim Ackermann: The art of the crisis in Venice. In: The world. May 13, 2007, accessed May 31, 2016 .
  7. ↑ Spectrum - International Prize for Photography of the Lower Saxony Foundation 2002. GermanGalleries.com.
  8. ↑ Sophie Calle. Hasselblad Award Winner 2010. Hasselblad Foundation.
  9. ↑ Von Menschen, Mäusen und Hirsch in: FAZ from January 19, 2018, page 14.
  10. ^ Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2017 ( Memento from November 11, 2017 in the Internet Archive ). Museum of Modern Art , Frankfurt.
  11. ↑ Sophie Calle: M'as-tu vue. Center Georges Pompidou .
  12. ^ Art Now: Sophie Calle - The Birthday Ceremony. Tate Gallery of Modern Art .
personal data
SURNAME Calle, Sophie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris