Sophie Calle is having her exhibition at Whitechaple Gallery until January the 3rd, 2010. In her striking work Shopie normally takes the audience to an uncomfortable place of emotions.
Her very last exhibition concerns an email she received from her partner in which is stated that he wants to break up with her. Sophie deconstructed this email with several points of view (literature, philosophical, psychological) and she invited 104 women to analyze, interpret and deconstruct the email. The exhibition translates the very moment you received the email, the process of reading the email and different ways, concerning 104 experiences, of interpreting and reacting to those moments and feelings.
I do believe that from the moment you have not experienced a similar situation, as an audience, you feel detached from what is happening or you are perceiving the refereed subject as a stranger. One can just perceive someone's disappointment, rejection, agony when you have been through the exact same experience but even though we do feel it in different ways due to our culture and personality development. The interesting characteristic is that Shopie Calle takes us to similar sensations we might have felt or we might be feeling. Moreover, Sophie underlines the inhuman courageousness someone has by using an inanimate object/technology in order to communicate such delicate matters. Nevertheless, I can express, from my personal experience, that sometimes when such subject has to be transmitted in person the same inanimate embodiment is taken by the announcer. Having said that, I can affirm that this exhibition was a clear methaphor for what I have experienced myself. Moreover I do encounter a similarity with the upcoming research that I am developing. As a consequence, on Identity, Gender and Activism research for dissertation purposes, I will research for my performance proposal on how does an individual loses one's identity when discovering he or she has to live with HIV/AIDS. It can be seen (as in Sophie Calle’s art work) as a similar, involuntary and an immediate shock upon recieving an information.
Canha
