New from the Whitechapel Gallery

29 July 2009

The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first UK retrospective of leading French contemporary artist Sophie Calle.

Sophie Calle's works are most frequently described in terms of shadowing and voyeurism, involving constructing identities and creating complex scenarios that are then documented through photographs and texts. They explore the field of social relations, each proposing an exchange, transaction or social contract with those whose lives she momentarily crosses. This exhibition brings together 12 key works from the late 1970s to the present, including the acclaimed installation Prenez Soin De Vous (Take Care of Yourself), 2007.

Calle began taking photographs of strangers on the streets of Paris in 1979. Her works arise from a series of actions or encounters; their parameters are dictated by the use of rules and instructions that echoes conceptual practices of the 1960s and 70s. Her position as subject within her work to explore social constructs has also drawn parallels with performance art of the same period.

Calle's works are presented in a pared down, objectivist manner that alludes to the disciplines of journalism, anthropology or psychoanalysis. Her works also make use of literary devices, as well as everyday forms such as the diary and the photo novel. The boundaries between fact and fiction are often ambiguous.

The exhibition will premiere the English language version of Prenez Soin De Vous (Take Care of Yourself), which the artist first exhibited at the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. This large-scale, multi-media installation, which will occupy the entire ground floor Gallery 1, takes as it's starting point an email in which her partner informs the artist that he is leaving her. Calle invited over 100 women from different professional backgrounds - lawyers, actors, accountants, singers - to comment through the lens of their professional vocabulary. The poignant, amusing and often poetic result transcends the personal to provide a polyphonic portrait of, and monument to, the women involved.

The exhibition continues in the upstairs galleries with an overview of earlier work. It includes The Sleepers, 1979, in which the artist invited 29 strangers to sleep in her bed. For The Bronx, 1980, Calle asked random inhabitants of the south Bronx to show her a place of their choice in what was then one of city's most violent neighbourhoods, a place that they would always remember should they one day leave. The collaborative nature of Calle's work finds different expression in works where her own actions and activities are dictated by others. They include the American novelist Paul Auster in Gotham Handbook, 1994 and Maud Kirsten, a medium and clairvoyant, in Berck, 2008.

Other works in the exhibition include: The Address Book, 1983; Anatoli, 1984; Los Angeles, 1984; The Detachment, 1996; Journey to California, 2003; Unfinished, 2003; Pas Pu Saisir La Mort (Couldn't Capture Death), 2007.