calendario eventi  :: 

X

27/1/2005

Sophie Calle

Ludwig Forum, Aachen

Werkschau

The French artist Sophie Calle (*1953) is considered one of today's most important protagonists of narrative photography. For many years now, she has combined biographic and fictional events in an emotional structure that involves the viewer in the rituals of a constantly re-invented life while denying him intimacy or even confidentiality. She focuses on personal encounters, often on love, pain and alienation but never on sentimentality or emotional exhibitionism. It has become rare that the form accredits the subject in this way, thus making it accessible beyond the confines of personal affection. Sophie Calle has developed her own personal instruments of concisely restructuring her stories, memories and investigations that makes them stand above all common places and talk-show rhetoric.

On the one hand, there is the serial character that is common to all her works and that may remind of the distanced objectiveness of sociological studies. Capturing the fleeting glimpse of a specific situation, the individuality of a face or some atmospheric mood is not what interests her. In a precise and calculated way, her series deploy and convey, apart from distanced objectiveness, the process-like character of each investigation, the currently possible perspective within a flowing continuum of time. On the other hand, there is the tight integration of text and picture that is typical of Sophie Calle and that constitutes her personal medium of exploring herself and the world. The literary structure of her texts that turns us into both a viewer and a reader often creates that productive dissonance with the shown photographs that gives her works their special charm. Especially the banality of the shown objects, the order of sequences and the serial excerpts are thereby charged with an existential meaning, whereas the images contain multiple possible stories thereby extending the text with visual might-be's. The third characteristic is not a formal instrument but rather general attitude towards the constant necessity of interpreting the so-called reality. With the amalgamation of imagination and reality, of fact and fiction Sophie Calle circumvents the repetition of merely biographic subjects and keeps the way free for all means of an ongoing self-invention. This is the only possibility to do the splits in the authenticity of her perception and the lightness of role plays, multiple identities and the increasingly frequent changes between presence and absence.

She observes herself and others but also lets private investigators observe her ("The Shadow", "20 years later"). For example, she invites complete strangers to spend a night in her bed ("The Sleepers"), she ships her bed to an unknown American ("Journey to California") to soothe his pain of separation or she offers the collection of a subjective chamber of treasures and miracles ("Bedroom"). In more recent works, that have been made specially for this exhibition, she explores all kinds of pain ("Exquisite pain") or the mysterious vanishing of a museum employee whose existence seems to have been suddenly and irrevocably extinguished ("Benedict - a woman vanishing"). Finally, the presentation leads to a large complex of photographic installations, films and background-lit show-cases that in their entity are called "Unfinished" and explores the behaviour of people using a cash dispenser by observing a large number of anonymous people. This selection that spans 20 years of artistic work offers a multi-faceted insight in the works and ideas of Sophie Calle who always claims that, to her, art is just a means of taking life seriously as an adventure and experiment.

The exhibition has been conceived in the Centre Pompidou Paris (curated by Christine Macel) and has already been shown in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. The exhibition in Aachen is also curated by Cécile Camart.

The exhibition is made possible by the Kunststifung NRW and supported by Peter and Irene Ludwig Stiftung, Stadt Aachen and the Media Partner WDR 3

A catalogue is published by Prestel Verlag, München, 443 p. english, € 69.

Press conference: 28. January, 11.00 h
Opening: 28. January, 19.00 h

Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst - Jülicher Str. 97-109, 52070 - Aachen

stampa

permanent link