SOPHIE CALLE – Louisiana Contemporary

Sophie Calle often uses herself as a narrative starting-point for the stories, she pursues in her work. This also applies to Take Care of Yourself (Prenez Soin De Vous), which was one of the highlights of the Venice Biennale in 2007, and which has since been translated into the English version, that was shown in the Hall Gallery of Louisiana. 

For Take Care of Yourself Calle has invited a wide variety of women (from a ballet dancer to a lawyer) to use their various professional skills to interpret an email where the artist’s lover ends their relationship. The results are poetic, touching and humorous statements which together form a monumental installation.

With her photographs, texts and film installations Sophie Calle (born 1953) creates fictions that lie close to reality. She plays with our perception of reality, mixes the private with the collective, often draws on journalism, anthropology or psychoanalysis and takes her point of departure in literature, the diary or the photo-novel. Calle herself acting and taking part of her own work as a mixture of innocent, playing child and undercover detective.

With undertones of the thriller, voyeurism, humour and subtlety Sophie Calles works appeal to the curiosity – as well as the emotions – of the public urging us to look over her shoulder. And to wonder: What is imaginary? What is reality?  

The exhibition at Louisiana also showed a number of the artist’s other works from 1979-2009, including The Sleepers, 1979, where Calle for a period lends her own bed to both acquaintances and strangers to photograph them while asleep, as well as the work Couldn’t Capture Death, 2007, where she follows her mother’s last minutes on film. The museum's own work Where and When? Berck, 2004/2008, where Calle lets herself be guided by a clairvoyant, naturally was part of the exhibition too. Louisiana acquired this work for its collection in 2008.