Sophie Calle is a photographer, writer, filmmaker, exhibitionist, detective, and spy. Given her ambiguous relationship with privacy law, she’s also been called a thief and a stalker. Unfettered by public opinion and legal claims, Calle, Paris-born and now 70, insists that she’s just an artist. Opening today at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, “Sophie Calle: Overshare” is the first Stateside survey of her provocative, genre-defying work.
Calle creates art in the first person. The protagonist of her own stories, she is both memoirist and voyeur, unsentimentally peeling back the layers of a life and urging us to peek inside. Although she has no formal artistic training, Calle does nod to Oulipo, the French literary movement of the 1960s, in the way she devises arbitrary sets of constraints and lets chance dictate the outcome.
