Sophie Calle images

The UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art (UC Irvine Langson Museum) presents Sophie Calle: Overshare, the primary North American exhibition to discover the total vary of the artist’s apply throughout the previous 5 many years on view at its Costa Mesa location on the Segerstrom Center for the Arts campus from January 30, 2026, by way of May 24, 2026. Traveling from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the survey exhibition captures the methods through which Calle’s early work anticipated the rise of social media as an area to form and current lived expertise.

Featuring images, text-based works, video, and set up, the constellation of works highlights the artist’s efforts to probe the boundaries between private and non-private; fact and fiction; management and probability. Calle faucets into our personal prying curiosities, asking us to query our personal displays of self, alongside that of others.

Curated by Henriette Huldisch, the Walker’s Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs in shut collaboration with the artist, the UC Irvine Langson Museum’s presentation is organized by Courtenay Finn, Co-Chief Curator and Director of Programs.

Calle has been working for the reason that late Nineteen Seventies and has come to be acknowledged for her signature strategy of pairing pictures and textual content. Throughout her apply, she makes use of the techniques related to surveillance and voyeurism to look at the advanced nature of human relationships, particularly notions and experiences of affection, belief, intimacy, and energy. Her mining of interpersonal dynamics, and curiosity in questions of visibility, disappearance, and manifestations of the self, are the throughlines of Overshare, with the title itself providing each a strategic conceit and provocation. 

“Calle’s work explores the complexity of human relationships, be it a family member, lover, or friend, examining issues of love, care, trust, intimacy and power,” Courtenay Finn stated. “Foreshadowing the current moment where so many of these relationships are performed and played out publicly online for all to see, Calle’s work is a poignant and timely reflection on what it means to be human today.”

The exhibition unfolds throughout 4 themes, titled “The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End,” and “The Beginning.” It features a choice of acclaimed, iconic works, together with The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), which seize Calle’s early fascination with the actual and imagined tales of individuals’s lives and interactions, in addition to lesser- identified initiatives such because the photographic sequence Cash Machine (1991-2003) and the associated video Unfinished (2005). Begun in 1988 on the invitation of a Minneapolis financial institution to make a piece for his or her artwork assortment, the sequence revolves round ghostly black-and-white images of individuals withdrawing cash from an ATM outfitted with a digicam. Calle by no means accomplished the fee, however spent over ten years grappling with the fabric. In Unfinished, she describes her lack of ability to complete the venture. The fee, and the story behind it, supply perception into the significance of each narrative and interpersonal alternate to Calle’s apply.

At the core of the exhibition are Calle’s Autobiographies, an ongoing sequence that the artist started within the late Eighties. Each two-part work features a framed {photograph} alongside a framed descriptive textual content. In the complementary True Stories sequence, Calle pairs these tales with an object relatively than {a photograph}. In both permutation, the quick vignettes chronicle episodes from Calle’s life, starting from incidental interactions and minor embarrassments to romantic breakups and loss. Regardless of topic, the Autobiographies are offered in Calle’s attribute model: concise, typically inconceivable, and sometimes very humorous. A bunch of autobiographical works contemplating the deaths of her charismatic mother and father, in addition to her personal mortality, comprise a devoted part within the exhibition.

The set up North Pole (2009) combines framed works and video from a visit to the Arctic in 2008. In the work, Calle pays tribute to her mom Monique, who by no means fulfilled her want to go to the pole, by leaving a few of her belongings within the floor. Additionally, the wall configuration My Mother, My Father and Me (2024) contains the Autobiography capturing how Calle accidentallycalled her deceased father’s cell phone and acquired the next textual content message in response, “Who r u.” In the work, she wryly concludes that Bob, her father, had despatched her a message. These works additionally all communicate to an ongoing thread associated to absence throughout the artist’s apply.

The exhibition additionally contains two large-scale installations, Voir la mer (2011) and On the Hunt (2020/2024), which whereas distinct in material interact with underlying concepts of longing. The latest work within the exhibition, On the Hunt incorporates a compendium of private adverts which have been printed within the classifieds part of the French searching journal “Le Chasseur Français” since 1895. For the set up, Calle chosen two teams of roughly 15 classifieds every for numerous time durations, which she mixed right into a textual content panel, framed, and put in as a diptych, with texts by ladies and men offered subsequent to one another. Mounted above these panels are pictures of searching stands within the panorama and nighttime surveillance photos of animals. The mixture of components attracts a barbed connection between trying to find prey and for romantic companions.

About UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art

UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art (UC Irvine Langson Museum) brings collectively the collections and legacies of the Orange County Museum of Art and UC Irvine’s Langson Institute and Museum of California Art below a shared mission of public entry, scholarship, and cultural engagement.

Open to the general public with free admission, the museum stewards greater than 9,000 works spanning California Impressionism by way of up to date artwork, reflecting the area’s inventive spirit and international affect. It operates throughout two websites: a 53,000-square-foot facility at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa and a 6,000-square-foot interim museum area in Irvine.

For extra info, go to uci.edu/langson-museum.

Locations and Hours:

Costa Mesa location

Segerstrom Center for the Arts

3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, CA 92626

Wednesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.; Monday & Tuesday closed

Irvine location

18881 Von Karman Avenue, Suite 100, Irvine, CA 92612

Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sunday & Monday closed

Please go to https://uci.edu/langson-museum/ for extra info.