In the summer of 2002, the Foundation of Lower Saxony is awarding the "Spectrum" International Prize for Photography, worth € 15,000, for the fourth time. The prize-winner is the French artist Sophie Calle. The jury (Christine Frisinghelli, Graz; Yuko Hasegawa, Kanazawa; Thomas Weski, Cologne; as well as Inka Schube, Sprengel Museum, Hannover, and Dominik von König, Foundation of Lower Saxony) commended the prize-winner in the following words: "In her extensive and multi-faceted artwork, Sophie Calle (1953*) is unique in the way in which she focuses on the dissolution of traditional conceptions of identity against the background of the continual communication of privacy in media society. Like a laboratory technician, the artist creates experimental set-ups and documents encounters, absences and losses as if she were searching for the concealed systems regulating interaction and structuring the memory of it. She often combines still or moving images with biographical or pseudo-biographical texts, thus shattering the credibility of the apparently authentic in the process."
After leaving school in Paris, Sophie Calle travelled the world for several years, during which she worked amongst other things as a barmaid, dancer and dog trainer. In her seventh year - like the prodigal son - she returned home. As her first art project, she invited 45 friends, neighbours and strangers to sleep in her bed.
The resultant encounters she then documented in photographs and text.
THE SLEEPERS (1979) is the first link in a chain of often almost unbelievable, adventurous intrusions into her own privacy and that of strangers that seems to make up Sophie Calle´s work.
What happens if I follow a strange man in the street (SUITE VÉNITIENNE, 1980)? What do I learn about people if I secretly research them in their hotel rooms (THE HOTEL, 1983)? Can I get to know someone by questioning people he/she associates with? And what happens if I publish my research as a column in a major daily paper (THE MAN WITH THE ADDRESS BOOK, 1983)? What conception of beauty do the blind have (THE BLIND, 1986)? What memories do the inhabitants of east Berlin have of the now removed monuments of Socialist rule (THE REMOVAL, 1996)?
In cooperation with the American author Paul Auster and the artist Greg Sheppard, she has more recently created groups of works devoted to the possibilities of interpersonal communication. One feature that makes the works of the French artist Sophie Calle so fascinating is her combining of image theory, semantics and psychoanalysis. In doing so, Sophie Calle handles these theoretical constructs with a virtuosic and seductive effortlessness by anticipating the observer´s voyeuristic delight in the disclosure of the intimate. Sophie Calle is one of those dazzling figures of the art world whose tales are familiar to almost everyone. Her biography is public and reflected in her so far over 25 text-and-image cycles and numerous temporary in-situ installations.
Sophie Calle´s exhibition to mark the presentation of the Spectrum International Prize for Photography 2002 of the Foundation of Lower Saxony at Hannover´s Sprengel Museum focuses on a selection of five of her central works. For the first time ever, she is presenting her Autobiographical Stories (since 1987) in a cycle of 27 text-and-image works. Also being presented outside France for the first time is 20 Years Later (2002), a remake of The Shadow (1981), which is on show as well. The presentation is being supplemented by what is probably her most controversial work, The Blind (1986), and the video Double Blind (in the film version No Sex Last Night) produced jointly with Greg Sheppard in 1992.
This exhibition therefore covers the full range of the artist´s output, from her beginnings through to her most recently produced work. And, by juxtaposing her Autobiographical Stories with the Blinds and by incorporating her detective stories and the road movie of a one-sided amorous yearning, the exhibition presents Sophie Calle as a master of the asymmetric view with the aid of which she repeatedly illuminates the relationship between seeing and being seen against the background of her knowledge of semiotic, psychoanalysis and image theory. The past recipients of the Spectrum prize are Robert Adams (1995), Thomas Struth (1997) and John Baldessari (1999).
Further information
Photography and Media: Inka Schube
T +49 511 168 - 4 62 11, +49 511 168 - 4 50 93
Press and Public Relations: Michael Quasthoff
T +49 511 168 - 4 39 24, F +49 511 168 - 4 50 93
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