Henriette Huldisch – författare

A career-spanning survey of the adored French artist whose conceptual works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaidThis volume accompanies the eponymous show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures Calle’s astute probing into the human condition and reveals ways that her early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to create and share oneself. The presentation features photography, video, installations and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different mediums to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Organized into four thematic sections—“The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning”—the book takes a new approach to some of Calle’s most acclaimed works including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), while also weaving in understudied works including Cash Machine (1991–2003) and Unfinished (2005). The catalog further explores this new examination of Calle's work with original writing by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza and Courtenay Finn.Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974 – 1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. Exploring the connections between our current moment and t he point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large - scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space . It presents a tightly focused survey of monitor - based sculpture made since the mid - 1970s.The exhibition catalogue focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art’s full institutional arrival — coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment — in the gallery and museum alongside painting and sculpture. Proposing to e xamine what aesthetic claims these works might make in their own right, the exhibition aims to resituate monitor sculpture more fully into the narrative between early video and projection as well as assert its relevance for the development of sculpture ove r the course of the 1980s in general.