The Museum of Hunting and Nature invites Sophie Calle to invest its rooms. Under the curatorship of Sonia Voss, the exhibition is the first museum presentation in France to cover several decades of the artist’s creation, since her retrospective at the Center Pompidou in 2003.

Sophie Calle’s work is built on the porous boundaries between autobiography and fictional narrative. At the heart of his work are the existential questions of gaze, otherness, friendship and death, transcended by rituals and play. The exhibition allows us to rediscover certain pieces of the artist in the context unique to the museum’s collections and also reveals works specially designed for the occasion.

Sophie Calle’s method of creation borrows certain aspects from the practice of hunting. Thus, she made herself known by practicing “tracking” of anonymous people crossed in the street. Changing roles, she also took on that of the prey and entrusted a private detective to follow her actions. The amorous pursuit, another variant of the manhunt, also runs through his work like a red thread, extended here by the announcements of meeting, source of inspiration for two new works.

On the way to Sophie Calle, we also find animals, sometimes intimate companions, sometimes phantasmal creatures. Stuffed animals even occupy an essential place in his life. She attributes to them a function of representation, establishing an emotional connection with the world of those close to her. The stuffed menagerie which populates its universe comes to inhabit the rooms of the Museum of Hunting and Nature during the exhibition.

Making the museum her “territory”, she inserts her own works there and thus incites the visitor to a new apprehension, invites him to track down in the decorative profusion of the rooms what is part of his intimate experience.

The artist Serena Carone has been invited by Sophie Calle to dialogue with her within the exhibition and presents several objects from her artistic bestiary. His work constitutes a sort of cabinet of curiosities born from experimentation and the work of the most diverse materials. At the antipodes of Sophie Calle’s conceptual approach, Serena Carone offers a world that is both marvelous and disturbing, and takes a unique look at the living world and its relationship to death.

Book published in conjunction with the exhibition:
Les Fanfares de circonstance, Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris (limited edition, numbered and signed / box including a hardcover book printed in red ink and wrapped in false fur)

Around the exhibition:
25 October 2017: screening of No Sex Last Night
15 November 2017: « La Playlist idéale de Sophie Calle » with Marie Payen, Albin de la Simone and Sophie Calle, in partnership with the festival Paris en toutes lettres (Maison de la Poésie)
22 November 2017: lecture by Sophie Calle