Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers

Whitechapel Gallery (London)
Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers

A set of colour photographs of women and a note explaining what has triggered Take Care of Yourself (2007), introduces the exhibitions Sophie Calle: Talking to Strangers to visitors at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in London. After contemplating the multiple interpretations given to Sophie Calle’s e-mail, sent by X (an ex-boyfriend) telling her that their relationship has ended, we go through several rooms arranged over two floor of the gallery. We dive into a game that combines sound, text and image, which is an extensive and comprehensive account regarding the artist body of work developed, since the Eighties.

The subject in Calle’s works is questioning the boundaries between what is public and what is within the private sphere. By using her body as a medium the artist encourages a series of provocative intended actions: following people on the street – a reference to 1969, Vito Acconci’s Following Piece –, or inviting strangers to sleep in her bed while she observes and photographs those individuals who were invited to trespass from the public in to the private sphere. She documents physical interactions between the observer and the observed to allow the other to know and become involved by her private domains.

The second part of the exhibitions works as a retrospective. It shows encounters and actions in which the artist creates events, but which hardly happen: traces left by customers at The Hotel (1981); the voyage in the Trans-Siberian, from Moscow to Vladivostok, where the artist shares a compartment with the Russian Anatoli (1984); Gotham Handbook (1994), a collaboration with the writer Paul Auster; Where and When? Berck (2004), etc.

More than a visual sequence of events, it is the written word that follows each project. Documenting every action, every situation, every event perpetuated by Sophie Calle along her journey, like a forensic scientist.

Coming back, to Take Care of Yourself, photos and printing gravitate with multiple specialized worlds, projecting each of the intervenient narratives. Numerous monitors screen the same matter, the commentary on the break-up letter, interpreted by more than 10 women and a parrot. We find ourselves, has the other, in the strange situation of being entrusted with her private experiences.

Published at Lapiz, Revista Internacional de Arte. Año XXVIII, Núm. 258 (90), December 2009 España © Sophie Calle, "Take Care of Yourself" (detail showing the Opera de Paris Dancer, Marie-Agnès Gillot), 2007