Sophie Calle: Overshare - by Henriette Huldisch (Paperback)

About the Book

"Sophie Calle: Overshare is the accompanying exhibition catalog to the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle's (France, b. 1953) 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 media to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Calle's works often combine photographs, videos, texts, and objects to examine the complex nature of relationships, whether between partners, friends, family, or strangers. She actively erodes the boundaries between private and public space, thereby both bringing the audience into moments of personal intimacy as well as hinging on our voyeuristic preoccupations with other people's lives. Across her career, Calle has continued to explore the dynamics inherent to relationships-love, trust, suspicion, intimacy, and power-and ways in which those forces also condition our sense and outward portrayal of our own identities. Her works feel particularly pressing and salient today as we continue to navigate the intractable presence of the digital realm in our lives"--

Book Synopsis

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.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

Review Quotes

For five decades now, Sophie Calle has been probing human connection, emotional impulses, and vulnerability via fictional devices, dry humor, and an unapologetic impropriety.--Sheila Regan "Hyperallergic"

Long a cult figure in France, Sophie Calle is admired in several disparate circles, each of which has a partial grasp of some aspect of her work --one thinks perhaps of Laurie Anderson by way of comparison.--Yves-Alain Bois "Artforum"

The first major North American career survey for Calle, who has already been well celebrated in Paris, her hometown.--Hilarie M. Sheats "The New York Times"

The largest-ever North American exhibition of work by a French photographer and conceptual artist who anticipated the boundary-blurring effect of social media.--Will Heinrich "The New York Times"

This catalog for the first American survey of French artist Sophie Calle, organized by Minneapolis's Walker Art Center, is, like the show, titled 'Overshare' for good reason: Calle is something like a Conceptualist high priestess of TMI, voyeurism, and stalking.-- "Artnews"

With Calle, strangers become subjects in illicit scenes that challenge the traditional boundaries of the artist.--Tracy Doyle "Air Mail"