Sophie Calle & Jean-Paul Demoule:
The Elevator Resides in 501
Text by Sophie Calle, Jean-Paul Demoule. Illustrated by Philippe Millot.
Forty years after her original exploration, Sophie Calle returns during lockdown to an abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay
Between 1978 and 1981, Sophie Calle went on a clandestine exploration of the then abandoned Hôtel du Palais d'Orsay. She selected room 501 as her home and without any preestablished method, set about photographing the abandoned hotel over five years. As she explored, she picked up items she found: customer reception cards, old telephones, diaries, messages addressed to a certain “Oddo” and more. Now, more than 40 years later, room 501 has disappeared and an elevator has taken its place. At the invitation of Donatien Grau, the Musée d’Orsay curator, Calle returned, equipped with a flashlight, to explore the site again during the lockdown period. She hunted down the ghosts of the Palais d'Orsay, now connected to the present by the visitors that had also deserted the museum. The work reconstructs the artist’s archive of photography, letters, invoices and other daily items which bring a forgotten past back to life. To provide commentary on her discoveries, Sophie Calle enlisted the award-winning French archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, who writes a series of texts combining fact and fiction. All of this evidence has been assembled to create an art object that resembles an investigation notebook.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid. She has mounted solo shows at major museums around the world and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. She lives and works in Paris.
Sophie Calle: Overshare
Edited with text by Henriette Huldisch. Foreword by Mary Ceruti. Text by Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza, Courtenay Finn.
A career-spanning survey of the adored French artist whose conceptual works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid.
This volume accompanies the eponymous show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s practice across the past five decades.
Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures Calle’s astute probing into the human condition and reveals ways that her early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to create and share oneself. The presentation features photography, video, installations and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different mediums to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Organized into four thematic sections—“The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning”—the book takes a new approach to some of Calle’s most acclaimed works including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), while also weaving in understudied works including Cash Machine (1991–2003) and Unfinished (2005). The catalog further explores this new examination of Calle's work with original writing by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza and Courtenay Finn.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.
Published by Walker Art Center | Paperback | 9.5 x 11 in | 200 pgs | 100 color | 100 bw.
Sophie Calle: The Address Book
Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, artist Sophie Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then began contacting the people — in essence, following him through the map of his family, friends, lovers, and acquaintences. Her written accounts of these encounters — juxtaposed with her photographs — originally appeared as serial in the French newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983.
Siglio, 2012 | Hardcover |
7.52 x 5.24 x 0.5” | 104 pgs
Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, artist Sophie Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then began contacting the people — in essence, following him through the map of his family, friends, lovers, and acquaintences. Her written accounts of these encounters — juxtaposed with her photographs — originally appeared as serial in the French newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983.
Siglio, 2012 | Hardcover |
7.52 x 5.24 x 0.5” | 104 pgs
Sophie Calle: My All
Texts and photos in the form of autobiography and confidences. This box of 50 postcards brings together Sophie Calle’s most famous works.
Actes Sud, 2016 Hardcover | 6.1 x 4.3 x 1.1” | 50 pgs
Texts and photos in the form of autobiography and confidences. This box of 50 postcards brings together Sophie Calle’s most famous works.
Actes Sud, 2016 Hardcover | 6.1 x 4.3 x 1.1” | 50 pgs
Sophie Calle: Detachment
Detachment is based on the same principle as Sophie Calle’s earlier work Fantomes and Souvenirs, exploring once again the topic of artefacts vanished from public view and how those familiar with these objects felt about them. In this volume, Calle interviews inhabitants of the former East Berlin, whom she asked to react to the disappearance of various symbols, monuments or commemorative plaques.
Actes Sud, 2013 | Hardcover |
7.7 x 4.2 x 0.6” | 72 pgs
Detachment is based on the same principle as Sophie Calle’s earlier work Fantomes and Souvenirs, exploring once again the topic of artefacts vanished from public view and how those familiar with these objects felt about them. In this volume, Calle interviews inhabitants of the former East Berlin, whom she asked to react to the disappearance of various symbols, monuments or commemorative plaques.
Actes Sud, 2013 | Hardcover |
7.7 x 4.2 x 0.6” | 72 pgs
