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M’as-tu vue [Did you see me] demands the title of Sophie Calle’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, confronting us with an attention-grabbing question and works to match. This major retrospective, eschewing chronology in favour of a thematic approach, encompasses the range of Calle’s career and shows previously unexhibited works, some of which were specially produced for the purposes of the exhibition.

From the chic photograph of Calle by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, which hangs across the façade of the Pompidou, to the glossy catalogue that it adorns, it’s a slick show – which poses the question of whether there is substance behind the style. During the course of her career, Calle has often raided the dressing-up box, adopting the various personae of Bridget Bardot, a chambermaid, a stripper, femme fatale, etc. She has also co-opted several alpha males, including Paul Auster, Jean Baudrillard and Damien Hirst, to collude in her games, which range from eating foods of only one colour to being followed by a private detective. There is a sense now of the need to look beyond this masquerade, however. The themes of presence and absence, voyeurism and surveillance usually invoked to discuss the work now seem exhausted. It is surely time for a reappraisal and an exploration of Calle’s debt to artists such as Christian Boltanski (apparent in her employment of a fictitious autobiography), while a Freudian interpretation that examines childhood, sexuality, memory and desire could provide an interesting reading of her oeuvre. All of which this show seems reluctant to investigate.





The exhibition begins with the previously unexhibited three-part work Douleur exquise [Exquisite pain] (1985–2003). A recollection of a failed love affair from 1985, which Calle cited as the (then) most painful moment of her life, Avant la douleur [Prior to pain], charts the 92-day period leading up to the separation while she was visiting Japan. Composed of photographs, letters, recollections and travel documents, all of them are marked impersonally and retrospectively with the visa-like stamp ‘8 days to unhappiness’, etc. After observing the dispassionate presentation of such personal trauma, the next room displaces and disconcerts the viewer. The centre of this triptych, Le Lieu de la douleur (The site of pain), reconstructs room 261 of the Hotel Imperial in New Delhi where a telephone call terminated Calle’s relationship. The room is empty and untouched, save for the crumpled sheets and the phone on the bed. The bed, a key concern for Calle and a favoured and famous motif of artists from Rauschenberg to Emin, here functions metonymically in evoking the misery she encountered.

The bed as a focus for Calle’s work continues with Voyage en Californie [Trip through California] (2003). A stranger proposed that he should spend some time in Calle’s bed to recover from a break-up. Rather than have him come to her bed, she sent it to him in San Francisco. The installation consists of documents and photographs narrating the trans-Atlantic voyage of the bed and the eventual recuperation of the love-lorn occupant. One of the artist’s first works, Les Dormeurs [The Sleepers] (1979), was created after she invited friends and strangers to spend eight hours in her bed and photographed them over the course of a week. Comprising of 200 framed black-and-white photographs accompanied by texts, this combination of word and image cemented Calle’s signature style over the ensuing years.

Calle is at her best when she is the interlocutor rather than the subject of her work. In the series Les Aveugles (The Blind) (1986), Calle asked a group of people who were born blind what their image of beauty was. Their responses, shown in transcripts alongside their portrait and a photograph of the object they cite, range from the prosaic to the poignant, while Calle’s authorial distance lends a certain sobriety to a work that would otherwise be maudlin.

From beauty never seen, to the remembrance of beauty lost, the next room contains one of the strongest pieces in the exhibition. Last Seen (1991) concerns the theft of works from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in Boston. A clause in Gardner’s will stipulated that nothing should be moved, so the trustees were forced to maintain the original hang, leaving the ghostly traces of the vanished artworks as an indelible reminder of their absence. Calle photographed the empty spaces and recorded the memories of the museum staff in text panels that are the same dimensions as the missing objects, thereby reconstructing the works in abstentia.

In the last room Une jeune femme disparait [A young woman disappears] (2003) explores absence of a much more disturbing kind. The young woman in question is Bénédicte Vicens, who admired Calle, observed the behaviour of visitors while working at the Centre Pompidou and was last seen in the street after a fire in her flat in 2000. This nexus of coincidences was obviously too compelling for Calle to ignore; she displays photographs of the fire-damaged flat alongside the charred photographs that Vicens took. Undeniably powerful, the work is equally problematic. Is Calle’s posthumous exhumation of the charred negatives homage or ransacking? Do we applaud or deplore this act? Next to these works a sign warns visitors that they may be watched as part of the exhibition, putting a clever spin on the show’s title. She’s not lying. As I walk out of the exhibition pondering these questions, Calle is walking in. Disconcerted, I stare at her, perhaps a little more than I should. She holds and returns my gaze, smiles and walks on, as do I, unsure who was the observer and the observed in this transaction.

Nicholas Cullinan

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