Overshare is the catalogue for the first North American survey of Sophie Calle's practice, tracing five decades of work that uses photography, video, installation, and text to probe identity, surveillance, and intimate disclosure.
About This Book
Organised around four thematic sections — "The Spy," "The Protagonist," "The End," and "The Beginning" — this catalogue reframes Calle's practice not as a series of provocations but as a sustained investigation into how selfhood is constructed and shared. The Walker Art Center exhibition it accompanies was the first in North America to survey the full range of her work, and the book takes that ambition seriously: canonical pieces such as The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980) sit alongside lesser-examined works including Cash Machine (1991–2003) and Unfinished (2005). The result is a rereading of Calle's conceptual art practice that shows how her early methods anticipated the logic of social media — self-exposure as both subject and medium.
Key Features
- 200 pages of photography, installation documentation, and text-based works spanning five decades
- Original essays by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D'Souza, and Courtenay Finn
- Notable works examined include The Sleepers (1979), Suite Vénitienne (1980), Cash Machine (1991–2003), and Unfinished (2005)
- Published by Walker Art Center, 2005
What You'll Discover
- How Calle's early conceptual strategies — shadowing strangers, inviting them into her bed, documenting others' private rituals — prefigured the self-disclosure culture of social media
- The thematic logic connecting surveillance and intimacy across her major bodies of work, reframed through four sections that move from spy to protagonist to endings and beginnings
- Lesser-known works such as Cash Machine that complicate the received narrative of Calle's practice and expand the scope of her engagement with everyday life
- Critical perspectives from four writers that together construct a new interpretive framework for understanding Calle's multidisciplinary art across five decades
About the Author
Sophie Calle is a French conceptual artist whose practice spans photography, video, installation, and text. Her work, which began in the late 1970s, is characterised by the use of rules, games, and social encounters to explore themes of identity, memory, and human vulnerability.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 200
- Dimensions: 27.9 x 24.1 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781935963301
- Publisher: Walker Art Center
- Publication Date: 2005
Perfect For: Artists, curators, and critics interested in conceptual and performance-adjacent practices; students of contemporary art history; readers exploring the intersections of photography, identity, and self-disclosure.