Sophie Calle: Missing
Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco
June 29 – August 20, 2017
Missing add a new chapter to Sophie Calle’s special relationship with the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1970’s, her career began when she photographed the words “Mother” and “Father” engraved on headstones in the Bolinas cemetery. Sophie Calle had been wandering the world for several years looking to find meaning for her life, when chance led her to the house of a photographer in the small community of intellectuals and artists north of San Francisco. Calle’s relationship with California and the United States has never stopped. From the early 1980’s onwards, her work has been widely exhibited in American galleries and museums while Calle successfully created site-related projects like Los Angeles (1984), No sex last night (1992), and Journey to California (2003). More recently, Sophie Calle acquired a burial plot in the Bolinas graveyard where she took her first photographs.
Sophie Calle’s Missing at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) is a major exhibition conceived as a journey which offers a survey of the French conceptual artist since the 1980s.
Missing emphasizes the analogy of mother and sea (“mère” and “mer” in French), while proposing a reflection on the universal concepts of disappearance, loss and absence, central in the artist’s work and exploration.
Rachel Monique (2007)—Installed in the former U.S. Army Chapel, the poignant and poetic multimedia installation features the personality and final moments of Sophie Calle’s mother.
Take Care of Yourself (2007)—Located in Gallery 308, Take Care of Yourself documents 107 women interpreting a break-up letter Calle received from an ex-lover. This body of work was originally created for the French Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Voir la mer (2011)—In the Firehouse, which offers a stunning view of the San Francisco Bay, viewers will experience the film installation featuring residents of Istanbul, Turkey, seeing the ocean for the first time.
Also displayed in the Firehouse, The Last Image (2010) is a series of photographs and texts that portrays the last visual memory of blind people.
Missing at Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture is curated by Ars Citizen, an independent art-commissioning and curatorial platform committed to advancing production and diffusion of contemporary art and ideas, founded by the San Francisco-based French curator Evelyne Jouanno.
FORT MASON CENTER FOR ARTS & CULTURE
2 Marina Blvd, Landmark Building C, San Francisco, CA 94123
