Sophie Calle: What Remains

Press Conference: Friday, March 6, 11am
Opening: Friday, March 6, 7pm

The solo exhibition What Remains is one of the most comprehensive presentations in the last 15 years in Germany of works by the French concept artist Sophie Calle (*1953). Examining such existential themes as blindness, familial relationships, love, loss, grief and historical culture, the various groups of works focus on absence and the way it lives on in memory.

Sophie Calle numbers among the most remarkable artistic personalities of the present era. Her works are both document and fiction. Calle is a virtuoso narrator who spreads out her stories within the dynamic field of photographic image and text in such a way as to involve the imaginative faculty of the viewer. The precisely staged juxtapositions of photograph and text thematize both Sophie Calle’s own life and that of others; they do not refrain from entering into both personal and external spheres of intimacy. Proceeding from social observations, autobiographical issues, investigations and interviews, there arises a network of assembled and staged traces which impart an insistent presence to the inner images and associations.

The exhibition brings together works from 1986 all the way to the present, with a particular emphasis on the work series Ma mère, mon chat, mon père et moi, dans cet ordre (My Mother, My Cat, My Father and Me, in That Order) (2012-2019), Série Noire (2018), Les Tombes (The Graves) (1990), as well as Les Aveugles (The Blind) (1986), La Dernière Image (The Last Image) (2010) und Detachment (1996). With respect to three of its work cycles, the presentation produced by ARTER ties in with the solo exhibitions at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Kunstmuseum Thun in Switzerland (2019) and is being supported by Institut français. In all the works of Sophie Calle, a fundamental role is played by what is absent, by the fragility of memory and by the power of the imagination.

Curator: Ute Stuffer (director Kunstmuseum Ravensburg)

Lectures & In Dialogue:

March 26, 2020, 7pm
In Dialogue with Thomas Seelig
A walk through the exhibition in the company of the Director of the Photographic Collection at the Museum Folkwang in Essen

May 28, 2020, 7pm
Lecture by Barbara Heinrich, curator and art historian in Berlin
“Reality and Fiction—the Strategies of Sophie Calle”

About the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg:
The Kunstmuseum Ravensburg was opened in 2013; it is the first certified museum in the passive-house construction style. Designed by the Stuttgart architectural firm Lederer + Ragnarsdóttir + Oei, the museum has been awarded such honors as the German Architecture Prize in 2013; it was declared “Museum of the Year 2015” by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). The basis for the museum is the Selinka Collection, assembled over four decades by the former advertising consultant Peter Selinka (1924–2006) together with his wife. The collection includes works of German Expressionism as well as by the artist groups CoBrA and SPUR; it complements a program of temporary exhibitions dedicated to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Contact
T +49 (0)751 82 810 MUSEUM
kunstmuseum [​at​] ravensburg.de
www.kunstmuseum-ravensburg.de

Opening hours:
Tuesday–Saturday 11am-6pm
Thursday 11am-7pm
closed on Mondays