L'Hôtel

  • 1981
  • Sophie Calle
  • Silver gelatin prints
  • Five panels

Calle invites the viewer as a witness to her creative sojourns, unwittingly converting one from an innocent bystander into a complicit voyeur and intimate collaborator. Demolishing the boundaries between performance and adventure, the anonymous and the intimate, the permitted and the forbidden, she offers a safe place to reflect on one’s habitual practices, material possessions and own purpose.

L’Hôtel comprises photographic and written documentations produced by the artist during a three-week post as a hotel maid in Venice, whereby she investigates the perceived lives of total strangers via their belongings and patterns of temporary habitation.

© Adagp, Paris, 2018. Photo © Louis Vuitton / Christian Kain

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Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle was born in Paris in 1953. After many years abroad, she now lives and works in Malakoff, France. Key exhibitions include a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2003), the French Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and solo shows at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2013), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2010), Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2014), Musée d’Art contemporain de Montréal, Canada (2015) and Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France (2017/18).

Her works appear in the permanent collections of MoMA and Guggenheim in New York, USA, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Pompidou, France, Tate Modern in London, United Kingdom, and many more. She received the Hasselblad Prize for the body of her work in 2010.

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