Sophie Calle: Overshare – A Restrospective on Five Decades of Art at the Walker Art Center
Sophie Calle, Mother-Father, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery; © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
A French artist with more than five decades of activity, Sophie Calle is known for her provocative and deeply personal work that explores intimacy, identity, and the boundaries between private and public life. Calle’s art consists of using autobiographical elements recorded on various mediums, such as photography, text, and film, juxtaposing ourselves with our voyeuristic tendencies. Sophie Calle was recently awarded the 35th Praemium Imperiale for Painting, a highly prestigious art prize by the Japan Art Association.
Overshare is the first retrospective in North America to recall Sophie Calle’s extensive artistic practice over the past five decades. Featuring photography, video, installations, and texts, the exhibition is driving us through works that examine the human condition while blurring the lines between private and public life. Anticipating on social media and our commodified bond to para-social relationships, Calle’s work shows the complexities of identity as much as it reveals our own judgmental gaze.
The Walker Art Center is hosting a series of events in connection with this retrospective. On October 26, 2024, Sophie Calle participated in a conversation with fellow artist Laurie Anderson. From October 28 to November 11, 2024, WaxFactory presented “TRACES”, a series of individual site-specific performances inspired by her work, staged across downtown Minneapolis. From January 9 to January 11, 2025, Forced Entertainment will present Exquisite Pain, a poignant performance exploring themes of love, loss, and the stories we create about our experiences, inspired by Sophie Calle – and many other related events.
This exhibition is supported by Etant donnés, a grant program of Albertine Foundation in partnership with Villa Albertine.