What shape does an ending take? What happens before it, and after? How can we pass through it – and how might we hold on to it?
These are some of the questions behind the major exhibition devoted to one of the most original and influential figures in international contemporary art. It brings together eight projects created between 1978 and 2026, along with a new permanent installation at Rome’s NonCatholic Cemetery for Foreigners.
Photographs, texts, videos, installations and autobiographical stories form a circular route through more than forty years of work. Together they explore the boundaries between public and private, reality and fiction, art and life. At its heart are life’s great themes: love and separation, grief and memory, desire and absence, failure and the chance to begin again.
Calle works in a spare, rigorous language. She turns personal and shared experiences into art through a method entirely her own, built on precise rules, gestures and rituals. Her works include a countdown to the end of a relationship, an attempt to capture her mother’s last breath, an inventory of unfinished projects and encounters with people seeing the sea for the first time. Each one becomes a way of asking what ends, what remains and what might still begin.
header: © Sophie Calle / SIAE (Roma, 2026), Autobiografie, Infarto silenzioso, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
What shape does an ending take? What happens before it, and after? How can we pass through it – and how might we hold on to it?
These are some of the questions behind the major exhibition devoted to one of the most original and influential figures in international contemporary art. It brings together eight projects created between 1978 and 2026, along with a new permanent installation at Rome’s NonCatholic Cemetery for Foreigners.
Photographs, texts, videos, installations and autobiographical stories form a circular route through more than forty years of work. Together they explore the boundaries between public and private, reality and fiction, art and life. At its heart are life’s great themes: love and separation, grief and memory, desire and absence, failure and the chance to begin again.
Calle works in a spare, rigorous language. She turns personal and shared experiences into art through a method entirely her own, built on precise rules, gestures and rituals. Her works include a countdown to the end of a relationship, an attempt to capture her mother’s last breath, an inventory of unfinished projects and encounters with people seeing the sea for the first time. Each one becomes a way of asking what ends, what remains and what might still begin.
header: © Sophie Calle / SIAE (Roma, 2026), Autobiografie, Infarto silenzioso, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Perrotin
Cataloghi della mostra
2026 exhibition’s catalogue
Sophie Calle. Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi