Ex1 Curatorial Text

“Her work was too nutty for that, too idiosyncratic, too personal to be thought of as belonging to any medium or discipline.”

In his novel Leviathan, Paul Auster introduces a character called Maria, based on the French artist Sophie Calle. However, in describing Maria’s rituals, projects and events that happen to her, Auster ‘mingles fact with fiction’. Included in the fundament of Maria’s character are two pieces (Wardrobe/ The Tie and Striptease/ The Blonde Wig) taken from one of Calle’s earlier projects – Autobiographical Stories.

The text from ‘Autobiographical Stories’, read by the artist, can be heard in the background. Each story explains the significance of a particular object in Calle’s life.

Objects similar to these are displayed here and are accompanied not only by Calle’s stories in audio format, but also by the stories on pages 2 and 3 (see post- Ex1 Traces: Stories & Objects) detailing an aspect of our relation to the actual objects on display. The varied nature of these stories which are often seemingly banal, but are also both true and personal, is juxtaposed with the highly amusing and occasionally outlandish nature of the stories told by Calle.

Are Calle’s stories truly autobiographical or are they actually an accentuated, exaggerated version of reality? A reality filtered through the lens of the highly stylized rules and rituals that characterize Calle’s work, in order to create an imaginary and perfected autobiography.

As Calle herself notes, the stories, along with other works in her oeuvre blur the boundaries between reality and imagination. Calle ends up believing the love letter that she receives from the writer she paid to write it, much as she is very much enamoured by the consistent attention paid to her by the private detective she hired to follow her around Paris in an earlier work.

These works highlight a commonplace [neurotic] response to the unsicherheit (unsafety & insecurity) of contemporary life: creating false rules, false securities and invented realities as coping mechanisms. Responding to a sense of disorientation and isolation, Calle’s works call into question the boundaries between public and private and examine issues of identity and intimacy.

The relation between the private, the public and the common, as well as the relevance of conventions and norms in the atomized world are highlighted. The stories presented in this exhibition add to this mix the element of willful transgression. They present varying degrees of personal information, without falling into mawkish confessional. They are small histories that combine to make a living archeology. They are answers that provoke questions.

This opening up creates vulnerability, which in contemporary societies is often a precursor for exploitation. However in the climate of unfear that pervades the truly common space, this vulnerability is transformed into a virtue. In the common space, voyeurism and invasion are inverted: they become an invitation, a platform for mutuality and engagement. Engage in recovering your identity from the unmediated arbitrariness that our own conceit and world making can leave us at the mercy of.

Invite yourself into the common space