Latest Works and Conclusion

Sophie Calle's later pieces were primarily about her romantic entanglements and the resulting heartbreak. Her two-part exhibition Exquisite Pain (2003) was about a long journey she took from Moscow to Japan, hoping to meet up her lover on the way. She documented her travels with photography and wrote about how badly she wanted to see him, but he called her saying that he had found someone else from a hotel room in New Delhi. The photographs, letters, and other mementos in Part I of the exhibit are stamped with "91 days to unhappiness," "90 days to unhappiness," and so on counting down their eventual break-up.

Part I of Exquisite Pain (2003) by Sophie Calle

Part II of the exhibition was about dealing with the misery that came from Calle's abandonment. She recounted her story to 99 friends, family, and strangers, then asked them to relay the worst moments of their lives in return. She recorded all of their tragic stories and juxtaposed them with her break-up, which made it seem trivial and helped her cope with the situation. In her own words, "At the time, I took on this project more for therapeutic than for artistic reasons. I can't remember whether I was planning to use it all later on as material - I think I must have been because I conducted the process seriously and with rigour. I knew the project would stop when I got bored with talking about my pain or when I became disgusted and ashamed of the way that my banal love affair was nothing compared to the stories of greater unhappiness they were telling me." (source)

In 2004, Calle's text Exquisite Pain was adapted into a performance by theatrical company Forced Entertainment based in Sheffield, England.

Part II of Exquisite Pain (2003) by Sophie Calle

While Calle has created smaller pieces since then, her largest recent exhibition was Take Care of Yourself at the 2007 Venice Biennial. This project chronicles a painful split with her boyfriend that involved him breaking up with her via email. She asked friends, strangers, linguistic experts, an etiquette consultant, a copywriter, a chess player, a forensic scientist, and several other women to analyze and criticize the letter, which ended with the words "take care of yourself." She said that "The idea came to me very quickly, two days after he sent it. I showed the email to a close friend asking her how to reply, and she said she'd do this or that. The idea came to me to develop an investigation through various women's professional vocabulary." (source) Photographs of women reading the email are displayed with their assessment of its contents, giving them the power and adding new meaning to the dismissive nature of the break-up. 

Take Care of Yourself (2007) by Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle's most recent work provides a clear image of her maturation as a person. She's graduated from stalking one-night stands to analyzing and tearing down long-term relationships, giving herself agency in the process. Sophie Calle is simultaneously straightforward and confusing, endearing and alarming, powerful and weak. She is so closely tied to her pieces that many of them are autobiographical in nature and she's unashamed to air her dirty laundry for all to see. Calle's legacy is so enduring that in 2001 Australian art student Vienna Parreno legally changed her name to Sophie Calle and displayed recreations of her work for her senior thesis. According to her artist statement she "didn't know what to do with herself." One has to wonder what the real Sophie Calle would think, as her entire career is based on the changing identities of those around her and knowing exactly who she wanted to be. 

Portrait of Sophie Calle