Sophie Calle: Overshare

On October 26, 2024, the Walker Art Center will open Sophie Calle: Overshare, the first North American exhibition to explore the full range of the artist’s practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures the ways in which Calle’s practice anticipated the rise of social media and reality television as spaces to shape and present lived experience. The exhibition features photography, text-based works, video, and installations, highlighting the artist’s efforts to probe the boundaries between public and private, truth and fiction, control and chance. Together, the works in Overshare reflect the ongoing poignancy and significance of Calle’s vision and practice to contemporary experiences and dialogues. 

Sophie Calle: Overshare will be on view at the Walker through January 26, 2025. The exhibition is curated by Henriette Huldisch, the Walker’s Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, in close collaboration with the artist. The show is accompanied by an expansive catalogue that includes essays by Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkema, Aruna D’Souza, and Courtenay Finn.

The exhibition unfolds across four galleries organized in different thematic sections, titled “The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End,” and “The Beginning.” It includes a selection of acclaimed, iconic works, including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite vénitienne (1980), which capture Calle’s early fascination with the real and imagined stories of people’s lives and interactions, as well as lesser-known projects.

At the core of the exhibition are Calle’s Autobiographies, an ongoing series that the artist began in the late 1980s. Each two-part work includes a framed photograph alongside a framed descriptive text. In the complementary True Stories series, Calle pairs these stories with an object rather than a photograph. Overshare includes a rare and expansive focus on the True Stories series, which has been underrepresented in prior presentations of Calle’s work. The section also includes the feature-length film No Sex Last Night (1992). Produced with Calle’s then partner, filmmaker Greg Shephard, the piece captures the couple’s precarious relationship during a road trip from New York to San Francisco. The installation North Pole (2009) combines framed works and video from a trip to the Arctic in 2008. In the work, Calle pays tribute to her mother, Monique, who never fulfilled her wish to visit the pole, by leaving some of her belongings in the ground.

The exhibition concludes with two large-scale installations, Voir la mer (2011) and On the Hunt (2020/2024), which, while distinct in subject matter, engage with underlying ideas of longing. The newest work in the exhibition, On the Hunt, features a compendium of personal ads that have been published in the classifieds section of the hunting magazine The French Hunter (Le Chasseur Français) since 1895.

“Calle is not on social media. It is not a sphere in which she presents her work, or is even particularly interested in. Rather, she works in analogue media, in the form of printed books as well as framed photographs with texts on the gallery wall,” said Huldisch. “And yet, her approach, which lives at the nexus of photography and autobiographical writing, has consistently engaged in different strategies of self-exposure. In this way, her practice presciently foreshadowed modes of performance and staged intimacy now prominent throughout literary autofiction, reality TV, and social media. This is, in part, what makes her work so timely and resonant for a broad audience.”

Curatorial team: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Erin McNeil, Manager of Curatorial Affairs, and Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts