Sophie Calle

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.

A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see. The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015). Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

"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).

No stranger to the art of staging and to the act of disclosure, Sophie Caile returns again here to the theme of autobiography and to the notion of the Other, revealing in all their difference and singularity those who have been blind since birth or who have gone blind following an accident. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and the photographs taken by her on the basis on these accounts, Sophie Caile offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another, on the notion of the visible and the invisible. In this publication, she revisits three earlier works constructed and conceived around the idea ofblindness, setting up a dialogue between them; in Les Aveugles (The Blind), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in La Couleur aveugle (Blind Colour), she asked non-sighted people what they perceived and compared their descriptions to artists musings on the monochrome; La Dernière Image (The Last Image), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, historically dubbed the city of the blind, gives a voice to men and women who have lost their sight, questioning them on the last image they can remember, their last memory of the visible world. The work, which is structured as an introspective triptych, uncovers sensibilities, perceptions and events that are painful, sincere. Sophie Calles idea is to underline the permanence and irony of a particular situation, with the aim of redeeming and highlighting the importance of sight.

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle presents 107 outside interpretations of a "breakup" e-mail she received from her lover the day he ended their affair. It is a poignant investigation of love and loss, published to coincide with the 2007 Venice Biennale where Calle served as that fair's French representative. All of the interpreters of Calle's breakup letter were women, and each was asked to analyze the document according to her profession. In addition, Calle asked a variety of performers, including Nathalie Dessay, Laurie Anderson and Carla Bruni to act the letter out. She filmed the singers and actresses and photographed the other contributors, so that each printed interpretation stands alongside at least one image of its author, some are also accompanied by digital documentation.

"True Stories gathers a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by Sophie Calle. ... 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" ... 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."--Artbook.com (accessed September 16, 2014)

This book provides a critical tool for navigating Sophie Calle's image and text work from 1979 to 2009. It includes an introduction by Iwona Blazwick and texts by Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss and Robert Storr, among other leading critics and theorists of Calle's work.

For Voir la mer, Sophie Calle invited inhabitants of Istanbul, who often originated from central Turkey, to see the sea for the first time. "I took 15 people of all ages, from kids to one man in his 80s ... once we were safely by the sea, I instructed them to take away their hands and look at it. Then, when they were ready--for some it was five minutes and for others 15--they had to turn to me and let me look at those eyes that had just seen the sea." The project was eventually composed of 14 five-minute videos, made for Calle by Caroline Champetier. Each person is filmed from behind, eventually turning to face the camera, revealing the emotions the experience has evoked. This charming catalogue features Calle's evocative photographs of these subjects.