Sophie Calle: Overshare

This finely made volume accompanies Walker Art Center’s career-spanning survey of Sophie Calle, whose boundary-pushing works fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints with “sleuth-like” investigatory methods and the appropriation of autobiography to explore tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret, and the unsaid. Divided into four sections—The Spy, The Protagonist, The End, The Beginning—Overshare presents Calle’s work from the late 1970s up to the present. Calle’s Art seems structured along secrets, with loss and absence as abiding and dominant themes. Her “Rules of the Game”embrace voyeuristic explorations of pleasure and “exquisite pain.” These stories about love, intimacy, trust, and power, are evoked from found and mined and meditated life. Hidden in plain view, they are uncomfortably private and irresistibly compelling. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.

This volume accompanies the first North American exhibition of Sophie Calle's work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, covering five decades of her practice. Featuring major and lesser-known pieces, the exhibition showcases Calle's exploration of the human condition and her early anticipation of social media's impact on self-expression. With photography, video, installations, and text-based works, the presentation is organized into four thematic sections: "The Spy," "The Protagonist," "The End," and "The Beginning." The book revisits Calle’s acclaimed works, such as The Sleepers and Suite Vénitienne, and includes original writings by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza, and Courtenay Finn, offering a new examination of her art.

2024; paperback; 9.5 x 11 inches; 200 pages, 100 color, 100 b&w; ISBN: 9781935963301.