2017 Infinity Award: Art — Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle has been making work since the late 1970s that employs provocative and sometimes controversial methods for confronting her emotional and psychological life. Her renowned exhibition, Take Care of Yourself—created for the French Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale—invited women to interpret an email Calle had received from a boyfriend abruptly severing their relationship. The artist orchestrated these interpretations into what Louise Neri described as “a tour de force of feminine responses...in a wild range of media” filling the pavilion. Since then, Calle has been developing an alternately poignant and humorous, deeply personal, and yet utterly relatable body of work titled Rachel, Monique, memorializing in myriad of stories and images the passing of her mother. Calle’s work has been shown at many international venues including the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Museum Boymans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (Tokyo), as well as at the ICP Museum. She was the recipient of the 2010 Hasselblad Award for photography and is nominated for the 2017 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.