Sophie Calle

Take Care of Yourself

First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photo book classic, and now expanded and reissued in this first English-language edition from Actes Sud, "True Stories" gathers a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by Sophie Calle. Calle's projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book--part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings--is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary. The first section is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard, a bathrobe and a bed, or musings on the artist's body, such as "The Love Letter": "For years a love letter languished on my desk. I had never received a love letter, so I paid a public scribe to write one. Eight days later, I received seven beautiful pages of pure poetry penned in ink. It had cost me one hundred francs and the man said: '...as for myself, without moving from my chair I was everywhere with you.'" The second section of the book, "The Husband," is comprised of ten recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage, by turns funny ("He was an unreliable man. For our first date he showed up one year late"), erotic and sad. A third section gathers various autobiographical tales, and the book closes with three interlinked stories titled "Monique." This new edition includes five new photo-text presentations and is the first English translation.

True Stories

After finding a lost address book, the artist sets out to understand its owner by randomly interviewing contacts to learn more about the personality and past of its owner.

The Address Book

Over the last two decades, Sophie Calle has made it her business to follow, peek into and illuminate the lives of people she barely knows, with results that both illustrate human vulnerability and tend not infrequently to pathos.

Exquisite Pain

Suite Vénitienne/Please follow me

"Originally published in 1983 in French under the same title by aEditions de l'aEtoile, Paris. Published in English in 1988 by Bay Press, Seattle, and in 1999 by Violette Editions, London, in Double Game by Sophie Calle."--Colophon

Sophie Calle: Suite Vénitienne

True stories

the Hotel

Double Game

A unique assembly of Calle's own thoughts and photographs of her belongings juxtaposed with objects from Sigmund Freud's personal collection, still kept in the house where he lived.

Appointment with Sigmund Freud

Suite Vénitienne

Das Adressbuch

S. Calle a interrogé des personnes sur ce qui les a fait le plus souffrir ayant elle-même mal supporté une banale rupture après avoir vécu trois mois au Japon.

Douleur exquise

"This volume, presenting Calle's installation of Rachel Monique at the Palais de Tokyo, was designed in close collaboration with the artist." -- from www.artbook.com/9782365111171.html (viewed 20 October 2017).

Rachel, Monique...

Suite à la réception d'un courrier électronique de rupture, se finissant par la formule Prenez soin de vous, l'artiste a demandé à 107 femmes d'horizon divers d'analyser et de commenter cette lettre en fonction de leur activité. Oeuvre de l'artiste présentée au pavillon français de la 52e édition de la biennale internationale d'art contemporain de Venise.

Prenez soin de vous

Three works of Sophie Calle whose point of convergence is disappearance.

l'absence

Souvenirs de Berlin-Est

Trois œuvres de Sophie Calle dont le point de convergence est la disparition.

L' absence

Fabio Balducci

En 1988, une banque américaine a invité Sophie Calle à réaliser un projet in situ. Elle se procure des enregistrements de personnes filmées à leur insu, effectuant des opérations aux distributeurs automatiques de l'établissement et veut trouver une idée pour accompagner ces visages. Quinze ans plus tard, l'artiste retrace l'histoire de cette recherche, et les raisons de son échec.

En finir

Jean-Paul Demoule

Forty years after her original exploration, Sophie Calle returns during lockdown to an abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any preestablished method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over five years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain "Oddo" and more. Now, more than 40 years later, room 501 has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musée d'Orsay curator, Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist's archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle enlisted the award-winning French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All of this evidence has been assembled to create an art object that resembles an investigation notebook. Sophie Calle(born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid. She has mounted solo shows at major museums around the world and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. She lives and works in Paris.

Sophie Calle

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