These are the exact words used by the French artist Sophie Calle (b. 1953) to introduce her project Take Care of Yourself.  The solo exhibition by her – an undisputed superstar of contemporary art – which opens at the Tallinn Art Hall on 28 November is definitely one of the highlights of the European Capital of Culture programme. 

Take Care of Yourself is a large-scale installation, which was first displayed in the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007. This is a work in which Calle skillfully and provocatively mixes the real and the fictitious, and deals with the topic of lost love in ways that are surprising in several senses. These hundred and seven women working in very different professions –artists, musicians, psychologists, scientists, etc. – who use various visual media (photos, videos, letters, etc.), provide interesting and sometimes paradoxical insights into women’s emotional states, thereby changing the personal into the public. By offering her story as a kind of case study, Calle takes this into the broader cultural and social field through reinterpretations, commentaries and diverse text analyses, and thereby changes it into an examination of love, betrayal and disappointment. Calle’s exhibition opens a new facet in the psychological analysis of the tractability of vain human nature by inspiring us to think about the artist’s responsibility when both truth and speculation, love and death, the sharing of responsibility and its depersonalization is brought into play in the treatment of autobiographical subjects.
 
Playing with the real and the fictitious, the private and the public has characterized Calle’s work since the late seventies, when she first appeared on the art scene. Starting with her first works, she has been interested in Personal contacts and conflicts with the Public, intimate contacts with the viewer and in upending situations. In her performative works she has tracked people she has met accidentally (Suite Venitienne, 1980), shared a bed (Sleepers, 1979), worked as a maid in a Venetian hotel and examined the guests’ personal possessions (The Hotel, 1981), talked to random people on the phone (Address Book, 1983), interviewed the blind and asked them to define beauty (The Blind, 1986), spent the night at the Eiffel Tower and let people read bedtime stories to her (Room with a View, 2003), etc. Among other things, she has also collaborated with various artists, including Paul Auster, an American novelist and director, who has also been published in Estonian. Calle is the prototype for Maria Turner, the main character in his novel Leviathan (1992), and based on this character, Calle, in turn, has appropriated a few fictional works by Maria (artist book Double Game, 1999).

Calle’s work takes the trivialized saying about a work of art being created from one’s life to a totally new intellectual and affect-related level, where an autobiographical case, provocation or event leads to a work of art that starts to speak more broadly about culture and society. Take Care of Yourself, which is on display at the Tallinn Art Hall, is a large-scale and far-reaching project; it is something between an opera and a soap opera, an interdisciplinary scientific study and a powerful sublimation of disappointment. This is a project that should touch everyone who has experienced anything similar to what Calle speaks about in this work. That is, everyone in the world.

photo credits: Ellen Page Wilson
 
For more information:
Anders Härm
Tel: +3726442818
Fax: + 3726448746
e-mail: anders@kunstihoone.ee
www.kunstihoone.ee

Tallinn Art Hall
Vabaduse väljak 6
Wed to Sun, 12 noon to 6 pm 
 
The exhibition will run from 29 November through 8 January 2011.

The exhibition in Tallinn is organised by Tallinn Art Hall in collaboration with AIA Productions, European Capital of Culture Tallinn 2011 and French Institute.
The grand supporters of the exhibition in Tallinna are:
CNIM, Dalkia, Saint-Gobain Glass Eesti, Scneider-Electric, Veolia
Exhibition in Tallinn is supported by:
Eesti Kultuurkapital, hotel ”Telegraaf”, Nordic Hotel ”Foorum”
Special thanks to:
French Embassy in Estonia and mr. Ambassador His Excellency Frédéric Billet
The Exhibition is produced by AIA Productions (A1PC+AIA), Paris