Sophie Calle

With her ingenious mix of fact and fiction, seriousness and playfulness, cool distance and unabashed intimacy, Sophie Calle stands as one of the most influential voices of contemporary art.

For five decades, Sophie Calle (born 1953) has been a leading figure in the visual arts with her original work that tackles the big questions of existence and human emotions in general – love, loss, guilt, fear, embarrassment, etc. – with warmth, incisive humour, poetry in a rigorous, conceptual mode of expression.

Her works often consist of a combination of photography and text. The registering sobriety that we associate with a photograph is combined with deeply personal narratives – the artist’s or others – that are both heartfelt, moving, messy, funny and ironic. In other words, the exact opposite of any kind of sober documentation. But Sophie Calle’s signature is precisely this field of tension between fact and fiction, between public and private, coolness and passion.

The exhibition, entitled Something Missing?, is created in close collaboration with Sophie Calle herself, and presents seven of the artist’s major series including a number of recent works. It comprises more than 300 individual parts – photographs, texts and videos – and takes up the museum’s entire West Wing.

Here Sophie Calle has asked 23 people, all of whom were born blind, what their image of “beauty” is. The question seems absurd, but the answers are as diverse as they are surprising and touching. While the concept of the work is quite simple and clear – as so often with Calle – it opens up big questions about cognition and image formation.

Over the years, guests have been able to meet works by Sophie Calle in presentations of Louisiana’s collection, which includes several of her works. In 2010, the museum showed Take Care of Yourself, which focused on one of the artist’s major projects.

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