Exquisite Pain, 28 days ago | 蘇菲·卡爾 (1984-2003)

Sophie CALLE

Exquisite Pain, 28 days ago, 1984-2003

Two colors photographs, two embroideries, flax, aluminium, frames

Courtesy Perrotin

分享藝術家資訊

攝影 : CLAIRE DORN

Artist's studio

Original text of the work

Grey text

Twenty-eight days ago, the man I love left me.

For three months I’d been looking forward to that day. It was January 25, 1985. I was in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi. A spacious room with a gray moth-eaten carpet, bluish wallpaper and twin beds. I was sitting on the one to the right, holding the telegram telling me to call my father because M. had had an accident. I had left France ninety-two days earlier and we were supposed to be meeting up at New Delhi airport on January 24. He was coming from Paris and I was coming from Tokyo. Then this message. Hours of imagining the worst went by be- fore I got through to my father. He hadn’t heard any- thing. So I tried to call M. He was at home – stupid but true. And, the accident was an abscess. I realized that he was leaving me. He wanted to make it less painful. He said he wanted to take me in his arms and explain a few things. Except that he didn’t. Ego- tism, cowardice or plain stinginess? And the best he could come up with was this childish excuse, this infected finger, using my own father as a medical alibi. I hung up. I sat there for hours on the bed, sta- ring at that damned phone. That red phone.

White text

It was on a Friday afternoon in July 1981, around the 20th. In the cemetery of a small village, forty ki- lometers from Limoges. Following a coffin in which there was nothing, nothing left of her. She had jum- ped from the sixth floor and was smashed to a pulp. There were four of us to bury her. Four people who hadn’t spoken for years. On one side, her mother and I. On the other, her half-brother and her father. I was the only one who could communicate with them all. Totally distraught, not knowing what to do with myself, I went from one person to another. On the way home, I looked up as I walked – I couldn’t stop looking at all the sixth floors. And then, I saw my name written in her handwriting on the mailbox. But the worst moment was when the coffin arrived. When I pictured my first real love, the person who for me was beauty incarnate, smashed to a pulp.

Exquisite Pain, 1984-2003

At the end of a three-month long study stay in Japan, Sophie Calle found out that the man she loved was leaving her. To cope with this event that she described as the most painful of her life at the time, she decided to ask to people: “when have you suffered the most?”. Gathering answers and repeating through speech and writing her own experience were part of a cathartic healing process that helped the artist mourn the end of her love story. Almost twenty years later, Sophie Calle decided to turn this experience into a series of 128 artworks, entitled Exquisite Pain. The first 92 pieces are photographs of each day preceding the date of the break-up. The 36 others, composed of two photographs and two texts, confront bribes of the story of her pain to that of others’. This collection of memories of the traumatic event unveils Sophie Calle’s path to recovery, from profound pain to mourning and acceptance. Emblematic of her artistic process, this series mimicking an archive invites the viewer into the artist’s intimacy and in that of anonymous strangers. Exquisite Pain shows glimpses of Sophie Calle’s life through an accumulation of words and images, thus conscripting the viewer to a voyeuristic game. As other major pieces, such as Birthday ceremony (1981) and Autobiographies (1988-today), this series positions the artist as both narrator and agent and calls into question the author’s status.

展覽 :
- Exquisite pain, Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan, 2019
- Dead End, Château La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, France, 2018
- Historias de pared, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia, 2012
- Historias de pared, Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, 2012
- Calle Sophie, Palais des Beaux-Arts, BOZAR, Brussels, Belgium, 2009
- "Douleur Exquise" curated by Scenography Frank Gehry and Edwin Chan at Luxembourg, European Capital of Culture Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 2007
- Exquisite Pain, Portland Art Museum, USA, 2005
- M’as-tu vue, Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany, 2003
- M’as-tu vue, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany, 2003
- M’as-tu vue, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 2003
- Douleur exquise, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, 1999