Sophie Calle

Galerie Sollertis, Toulouse

Acquired by the present owner in 2006 (Acquistato dall'attuale proprietario nel 2006)

Toulouse, Galerie Sollertis, Sophie Calle, Double Jeux, 1999

Exhib. catalogue, Sophie Calle, M'as-tu vue, Musée d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou, Paris, p. 434 (another example)

Original text of the work

I wanted a love letter, but he would not write one to me. One day, I saw the word "Sophie" written at the top of a piece of stationery. This gave me hope. Two months after our wedding, I noticed the edge of a piece of paper sticking out from under his typewriter. I pulled it toward me. The last line of the letter appeared: "My confession is last night, I kissed the envelope with your letter and photo." I continued to read, in reverse: "You asked me once if I believed in love at first sight. Did I ever answer you?" At the top of the page I noticed these words were not addressed to me but to a letter "H". I crossed out the "H" and replaced it with an "S". This became the letter I had never received.

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Autobiographies, 1988-today

Since 1988, Sophie Calle has been enriching an ongoing series called Autobiographies. Each work of this series is composed of a picture and a text, presented under the form of framed pieces, wooden boxes or light boxes. Through her photographs and writings, she cultivates contrasts between a cold technical representation and an intimate but distanced content. Gathered in a book entitled True Stories, this series displays a compilation of fragments of Sophie Calle’s life, thus enrolling the viewer into a game in which his position oscillates between that of the voyeur and that of the detective. 

Autobiographies inevitably raises the question of the heuristic scope of an accumulation of texts and images, a topic the artist explored in other series evoking pastiche documentary or inquiry work, such as The Hotel, a series revealing the content of guests’ rooms in a venetian hotel. Indissociably weaving together facts and fictions about her own life in Autobiographies, the artist takes on the roles of narrator and agent in this piece of visual literature. This blurring of the boundaries between the author and its subject lies at the heart of Sophie Calle’s artistic process.