Sophie Calle. Modus vivendi

About

Over the last four decades, this French conceptual artist has explored her relationship with others and with herself in an endeavour to fashion a way of looking and a quest for personal development. Her pieces are always written in the first person singular, but her relationship with others forms an implicit part of her search for beauty and art in all its facets.

With this in mind, the exhibition is laid out in two parts. The first section presents work in which the artist scrutinises others and otherness by fashioning ways of looking and by searching for beauty. It opens with the series The Blinds (1986), the only piece that formed part of the last major show on Sophie Calle in Spain, at ”la Caixa” Foundation in Madrid and Barcelona (1996–1997). She not only explores the subject of blindness but also asks how we remember what is no longer there and what defines identity and beauty in the sea, a picture or a person.

The second section presents projects on one of the central themes in her work: the relationship between real-life personal stories and fiction. It includes the series Autobiographies, with different episodes narrated by the artist herself, and her biggest installation to date, Take Care of Yourself (2007), which was on show at the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The exhibition ends in the former dining room at the Palau de la Virreina, which Sophie Calle turns into a room of her own, filling it with objects that shape her as an artist and revealing how she experiences love and desire and how she relates to others and to art.