Sophie Calle

One of the great conceptual artists working today, Sophie Calle writes, photographs, and makes installations and films with a provocative, voyeuristic edge. Her methods are often participatory and incorporate elements of surveillance. Since the 1970s, the self-taught artist has executed projects that have involved working as a hotel maid and rifling through guests’ belongings; inviting strangers to spend hours in her bed and documenting the results; following a relative stranger from Paris to Venice; filming her mother’s dying moments; and inviting more than 100 women to respond to a breakup letter from her ex. Intimacy, romantic relationships, grief, loss, obsession, and vulnerability have become recurring themes. Calle has been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Centre Pompidou, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the High Museum of Art, and her work belongs in collections worldwide. In 2007, she represented France at the Venice Biennale.