Sophie Calle

For 30 years the Paris-based artist Sophie Calle has been preoccupied with boundaries—especially those between private and public. In her work, she has exploited the demise of photography’s authoritative status as factual evidence in our postmodern world of mass replication and digital transformation. Undermining once-stable boundaries between fact and fiction, Calle leaves us to perform our own detective work based on the evidence she provides.

Coincidence and chance inform her works, as does a psychological undercurrent that she connects with the voyeuristic nature of photography. Calle has often used the format of the captioned photograph, implicating us in her project of destabilizing photographic veracity and suspending meaning through uncertainty, but paradoxically leaving us to doubt her persuasiveness.

Full article at Canadian Art

It’s often presumed that privacy is a myth in our technologically enmeshed world. Yet it’s a testament to the reverse that artist Sophie Calle, after more than 25 years of stealing strangers’ phone books (L’Homme au carnet), photographing hotel visitors’ underwear (L’Hôtel) and stalking strange men through Europe (Suite vénitienne), still manages to find uncomfortable aspects of the private—often in her own life—and expose them through art in unique and provocative ways.

Now the DHC/ART Foundation offers a peek at Calle’s latest with the North American premiere of “Prenez soin de vous,” a major exhibition that debuted to good reviews at last year’s Venice Biennale.

Full article at Canadian Art