Sophie Calle. Wall Stories

After Beatriz González exhibition, we are opening 2012 with the work Wall Stories by the renowned French artist Sophie Calle, of whom Newsweek said in 2011 "... she could be, along with nine other selected artists, the next Rembrandt, Picasso or Leonardo".

Thanks to the joint efforts of the Medellin Museum of Modern Art, the Art Museum of Banco de la Republica, and the collaboration of the French Embassy and Alliance Francaise, we will open this itinerant exhibition from March 21 to June 3 in Medellin, and then in Bogota from June 16 to September 20.

This exhibition includes the installations Les Aveugles (The Blind), Voir la Mer (See the Sea), Douleur Exquise (Exquisite Pain) and No Sex Last Night, which reflect a recurrent issue in the work of Sophie Calle: intimacy, particularly, hers. This artist uses a wide variety of recording media such as books, photographs, videos, films or performances. In her conceptual and poetic work she consciously conceals the borders between art and life, fiction and reality, what is public and what is private.

This will be then, a unique opportunity to enjoy and learn about the work of one of the most important artists in the current contemporary art scene, and to ensure better use and understanding of her work, we will have a supplementary academic and cultural programming including: workshops for youth and children, a particular experience with the workshop of the Museum Representations (for the visually impaired), conversations about art, philosophy and aesthetics regarding the problem of the body or the body as a problem, the Video MED2012, the advisory center about the exhibition, and a course of French literature, among others.

The Blind "I worked on this in France and Australia. I do not know why I asked about beauty. Simply, I met a group of blind people in the street and one said to his friends: ‘Yesterday I saw a beautiful movie’. It took me two years to finish this project. I was afraid of the element of cruelty implicit in asking a blind person what beauty is. Also, in this work we find again the idea of looking without being watched. This is not research into the idea of beauty. I am not interested in showing that the blind can see"(Sophie Calle). In Les Aveugles (The Blind), one of her most successful works, Calle collected the testimony of several people that were born blind as to what they think beauty was. Each piece consists of a photo-portrait of the person, along with another picture with that person’s written testimony, and underneath, a picture of what the person has mentioned as a subjective impression of beauty. In this project, Calle juxtaposes black and white photographs, text and a color photograph of the object on which she interpreted the answer to the question about that person’s image of beauty.

Exquisite Pain "In 1984 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France gave me a three-month scholarship in Japan. I left on October 25, unaware that that date would mark the beginning of a 92-day countdown to the end of a love relationship. Nothing extraordinary, but for me, at that time, the saddest moment of my life, and I blame the trip for that. I got back to France on January 28, 1985. From that moment on, whenever people asked me about the trip I skipped the Far East bit and told them about my suffering instead. In turn, I started asking both friends and chance encounters: "When did you suffer most?" I did this consistently until I got over my pain by retelling my story and relativizing it before the others. The method proved radically effective: three months later, I was cured. However, fearing a possible relapse, I decided not to exploit the experiment artistically. By the time I returned to it, fifteen years had passed” (Sophie Calle). Douleur Exquise (Exquisite Pain) is a powerful narrative that retells a trip abroad, the loss of love, suffering, and the usual catharsis. It is the diary of a journey from Paris to Tokyo, via the Russian Siberian Express, and the story of a failed meeting in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi. This is an installation that unfolds in three parts: the first is the exhibition of 92 photographs and some ephemeral objects that remind each one of the days of Calle’s trip before breaking up. This journal serves as a countdown to days of rejection and desolation; each photograph or sealed document is marked with a number indicating the number of days remaining for the moments of unhappiness. The second part is a three-dimensional reconstruction of room 261 at the Imperial Hotel, the site of Calle’s love tragedy, and the third part is the exorcism. Calle's own story faces the narratives of pain and breakup of other people. For the artist, this pattern of repetition and variation of her own history managed to transform the facts that created her tragedy and helped her sorrow soften.

See the Sea "In 2010 I went to Istanbul, a city surrounded by water. I met people who live there and have never seen the ocean. I filmed their first time" (Sophie Calle). This project started with an exhibition that Calle had at the Museum Sabanci, within the framework of the Istanbul Biennial, entitled For the Last and First Time. Sophie directs her gaze and examines from her unique perspective both the "latest images" of people with visual impairments, and the experience of people who live in Istanbul and have never seen the ocean. See the Sea is an invitation to reflect about the different and complex dimensions of sight, a sense whose existence is rarely thought about and often taken for granted. Filmed by Caroline Champetier, renowned French filmmaker, the first and impressive encounters of these people, marginalized and alienated in their own cities, without ever having visited the sea that surrounds them, are captured in several videos. Those selected to participate in this project were chosen with the help of the township of Esenler, including in the group a large number of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Central Anatolia, who, left behind their roots and in search for a new future, migrated to Istanbul where they settled in the outskirts.

No Sex Last Night A film by Sophie Calle and Gregory Shephard / 1992 / 72 min. In her first video project, Calle joins her collaborator / partner Gregory Shepard to create a voyeuristic tour. Armed with video cameras, they traveled to the western United States in a convertible Cadillac to produce and document a reallife narrative about their experiences and relationships. In this video each one records a sort of personal diary, presenting completely different versions of their relationship. Using their cameras as the tools of a duel, the protagonists create a chronicle of a complex and difficult cartography of human relationships and their struggle to reconcile, sexuality and desire. The viewer is challenged to face the possibility of reconsidering the cultural roles imposed by gender, sexuality, power and tradition. Throughout this process, Calle seeks to redefine through personal research, the terms and parameters of the relationship subject / object, public / private, truth, fiction and role games.

Sophie Calle
Wall Stories