Sophie Calle: Prenez soin de vous

DHC/ART is delighted to present Sophie Calle's critically acclaimed exhibition Prenez soin de vous (Take care of yourself).

At the heart of this exhibition is a break-up e-mail that the artist received from a lover, which ends with the line "Take Care of Yourself". Sophie Calle decided to do just that:

"I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words "Take Care of yourself". And so I did. I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself."

In Prenez soin de vous ¬ - a massive installation comprising texts, photos, films and voices - the break-up letter is abstracted into digital code, Braille and shorthand, but mainly it is endlessly interpreted through the professional vocabulary of the many women. This poetic, humourous and touching project speaks to us all about our relation to the beloved and builds to a powerful meditation on loss.

France's pre-eminent artist, Sophie Calle combines photography, text, video and performance in playfully conceptual and often autobiographical narratives concerned with absence, desire and loss. With a heady mix of humour, pathos, fetishism and voyeurism, her work repeatedly tests and redraws the boundaries of private and public, art and life. She often employs self-established guidelines, questions or rituals to transform her life into image and text-based works. She acts as the voyeur, The Sleepers (1979), The Hotel (1981) the pursuer Suite vénitienne (1983) or shares her love sorrows with others in Exquisite Pain (1984-2003), Double Blind (1992) and in her most recent exhibition, Take Care of Yourself (2007). Her experiments with different forms of photographic documentation: archival images, street photography, surveillance imagery and portraiture are combined with texts and stories and become compelling works that reside wistful ly between fiction and reality.

Sophie Calle
Prenez soin de vous