| | | |  | | | Sophie Calle: "Que voyez-vous ? Paysage avec un obélisque. Flinck.", 2013
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP Paris 2019
Photo: Claire Dorn / Courtesy Perrotin | | | | | | Un Certain Regard | | | | 8 June – 25 August, 2019 | | | | Opening: Friday, 7 June, 6-10pm | | |  | | | | | | | | | |  | | | "I met people who were born blind. Who had never seen. I asked them what their image of beauty was."
"I saw my son in a dream. He was ten years old. He was in pyjamas. He looked at me and smiled.
He walked towards me. I thought he was very beautiful" Sophie Calle: "The Blind. My son, 1986" - "Les Aveugles"
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP Paris 2019; Courtesy the artist & Perrotin | | | | | | Sophie Calle, born in Paris in 1953, is a conceptual artist, photographer and film-maker. Her work has a unique individual style, a distinct blend of meticulous research, interviews and combinations of image and text. Calle’s artistic approach does not strive for perfection or objectivity; rather the artist seeks out a personal angle, a way into her material in which the in-between space becomes a key element. Her projects are nested in a close-knit web of references and cross-references in which the boundaries between reality and fiction, between private and public and between past and present are dissolved.
The exhibition "Un certain regard" comprises five work series that deal thematically with the representation of absence: with images that have disappeared and been removed from sight. The exhibition combines series – most of them created over the last fifteen years – that translate Calle’s creative output into a distinctive and singular experience, to be presented now for the first time in Switzerland in a monographic exhibition.
For "Les Aveugles" (1986), Sophie Calle interviewed blind people and asked them to describe their image of beauty. The portraits of the interviewees are accompanied by their responses to her questions and by photos that the artist took to relate to the descriptions.
For "La Dernière Image" (2010), Calle interviewed people in Istanbul who had lost their sight, talking to them about the final visual image they recalled before going blind. Here too the portraits of the protagonists and excerpts from the interviews are combined with photographs that help recreate the situation described. Both series break with one-dimensional patterns of perception and point to the complex and interwoven realities of imagination and representation. | | | | | |  | | | David is dead. Because I have no words to describe his world
Sophie Calle, Parce que (Because), David, 2018
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP Paris 2019
Photo: Claire Dorn / Courtesy Perrotin | | | | | | In "Que voyez-vous ?" (2013), Sophie Calle turned her attention to the absence of concrete objects. In 1990, thirteen artworks were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Since then the museum has displayed empty picture frames in their place. Calle portrays museum visitors standing in front of five of these "placeholders" and asks, "What do you see?" The answers are reproduced in full and hang beneath the portraits – some of the gallery-goers remain unaware that what they are seeing is a "blank". Instead, the act of contemplating the vacant space turns it into something worth looking at.
In "Detachment" (1996), Calle compiles photographs of non-places: vacated plinths, empty expanses of grass, square holes in concrete slabs. They are historical witnesses of, and testimony to, the changes that went hand in hand with the reunification of Germany in 1989. All the symbols representing the former GDR have been removed. Under the pictures are transcripts of the responses of passers-by whom Calle interviewed about their memories and sense of connection to the erstwhile statues and monuments.
"Parce que" (2018) in turn shows a series of photographs, each of which is covered by a predominately dark curtain bearing a quotation printed in white. All the quotes begin with the words “Parce que” (“Because”) and explain the thinking that prompted Calle to take the photo that is mounted below the text. The exhibition visitor can lift the curtain and look at the photograph. No inferences can be drawn about the pictures from the explanations – for the most part vague and very personal – which the viewer will have read before looking at each image. | | | | | |  | | | Sophie Calle: "Que voyez-vous ? La voyante", 2013
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP Paris
Photo: Claire Dorn / Courtesy Perrotin | | | | | | Calle’s meticulously thought-out idea questions the supremacy of the word and shows the degree of interdependence between what is said and what is seen. Sophie Calle’s oeuvre has been displayed in numerous solo and group exhibitions for over forty years, appearing in a variety of international settings, ranging from the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2003–2004), and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2009), to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2013), and Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, Nagasaki (2016). In 2007, Sophie Calle represented France at the Venice Biennale and received the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2010.
The exhibition is produced by ARTER and kindly supported by Ringier AG, Landis & Gyr Foundation, S. Eustachius-Foundation and Else v. Sick Foundation.
"Sophie Calle – Un certain regard" is curated by Nadine Wietlisbach and has been developed as the first part in a two-part exhibition in cooperation with Kunstmuseum Thun. "Sophie Calle – Regard incertain" will be shown at Kunstmuseum Thun from 7 September – 1 December, 2019.
ACCOMPANYING PROGRAMME
17 July 2019, 18:30
Special guided tour with Dr. Gesa Schneider, director Literaturhaus Zürich, and Nadine Wietlisbach on the combination of text and image and the spaces in between.
24 August 2019, 16:00
Special guided tour with Michael Fehr, narrator, and Nadine Wietlisbach on seeing and not seeing, memories and sensory perception. | | | | | |  | | | I met blind people. Nine men and four women. Most of them had lost sight suddenly, the others gradually.
I asked them to describe the last image they saw. I photographed them.
I tried, whenever possible, to reproduce or recreate this last image.
I looked at Istanbul through their eyes. Sophie Calle: "La Dernière Image. Aveugle au minibus", 2010
© Sophie Calle / ADAGP | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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