Sophie Calle: Overshare

A career-spanning survey of the adored French artist whose conceptual works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaidThis 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.

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

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