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Exquisite Pain
Sophie Calle
Artwork 2000
Artwork: Sophie Calle, Exquisite Pain (2000). Vinyl wall text and book. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.
Artist Sophie Calle Title Exquisite Pain Date 2000 Materials Vinyl wall text and book Dimensions Dimensions variable Credit Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin

Thirty-six days ago, the man I love left me. It was January 25, 1985, at two in the morning, in room 261 of the Imperial Hotel.

So begins Calle’s Exquisite Pain, a work that extends personal grief into collected reflections on love and loss. The work proceeds towards a rupture; for ninety-two days, the artist awaits the arrival of her lover, recording her happy anticipation in a series of photographs. The day arrives. He fails to appear. The relationship ends (over telephone, across continents). Heartbroken, Calle recounts the subject of her grief to anyone who will listen. In turn, she asks each listener, “when have you suffered the most?” The resulting exchanges, accompanied by images, comprise the book’s final thirty-six spreads. On each: two texts – the artist’s and the stranger's – and two photographs. Narrating and re-narrating her grief, Calle attempts an escape from her mourning. For sixty days, she repeats the story of her heartbreak. Writing on the fifteenth day following the rupture, Calle says: “He’s the one I want to talk about. Until I’m up to here with him. Disgusted. He’s the one I have to get rid of.” Witnessing the suffering of others becomes a balm to her grief – “they made my pain manageable” – a way out of heartbreak’s hold. Though perhaps self-interested, Calle’s mourning mechanism offers its participants both cathartic release and an object of safekeeping (a book) to house their pain. The viewer assumes the part of distant witness, watching at a remove the grief of anonymous others. 

Excerpt from Sophie Calle, Sans Titre (2012), a film by Victoria Clay Mendoza with Sophie Calle (S.C.):

S.C. People think they know my life because I am always talking about it. But I do not feel like I am revealing anything.

My work is not a blog nor an intimate diary.

This happened, that happened but it is not The Truth. I have selected one moment amongst many others, separated it, given it importance and written it, generally it is just an ordinary moment.

We have all received a break-up letter, been left, felt lonely, I just use those moments for my work and to turn the situation around and distance myself from it.

Obviously I speak only of situations gone wrong.

Who wants to know I spent six years with a man that loved me and with whom there were no conflicts.

I live the happy moments, the sad ones, I exploit for artistic reasons, to turn them into a piece. Even if the starting point is therapeutic, the real reason is for the piece to end up hanging on a wall or be in the pages of a book. 

A certain slipperiness defines Sophie Calle’s practice, which turns on a singular, voyeuristic intrigue into the lives of others. Central to all her works is stated absence – of the beloved, of sight, of permission to intrude. The artist performs as a storyteller, spy and stalker, compiling intimate accounts of her subjects (who are more often unwilling strangers). The resulting narratives speak to loss, longing, and the opacity of selves other than one’s own. Missed connections offer a theme; suggested encounters fail to arise. A curious inclination to expose domestic privacy and an archival impulse to document – in words and photographs – directs her work and its indiscretions. Calle, disguised as a cleaner, photographs the possessions of guests in a hotel. She shadows a man to Venice and records his every movement unnoticed. An address book found in a street is returned to its owner but not before the artist has photocopied it; every contact later interviewed to form an impression of the stranger to whom the book belongs. Text is primary in recounting these encounters, the artist distilling her transgressions in lyrically spare prose. Calle maintains a distinct distance from her stated subjects – even her own heartbreak and the death of her mother – framing her vulnerabilities and those of others with studied detachment.

A String of Pearls
Lemeeze Davids

A mollusc cannot remove or erase a disturbance, but it can transform it into an iridescent object. Looking at how vulnerabilities can be processed over time, six artworks are strung together as pearls. – October 25, 2024

Path page
A String of Pearls
Lemeeze Davids
A mollusc cannot remove or erase a disturbance, but it can transform it into an iridescent object. Looking at how vulnerabilities can be processed over time, six artworks are strung together as pearls. – October 25, 2024
Path page

The pearl, an irritant held within a soft inner world, is a convalescence.

Protection is the first priority, but out of the process comes a glistening rounded object, a metaphor for something valuable, innocent.

There is a commonly held belief that a grain of sand is the usual catalyst, but a pearl can be created from any organic material or damage to the mollusc's body. The pearl is the antithesis of a lacuna.

The saying, “The world is your oyster,” came from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602): “Why then, the world's mine oyster,/Which I with sword will open."

My initial sense was that the saying alluded to ‘a world of possibilities’, so it shocked me that the aphorism was born of the sentiment of ‘you cannot remove a pearl without force.’

Artwork photograph that shows Peter Clarke’s acrylic painting ‘Anxiety’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, which shows a group of figures arranged on a hilltop.

Anxiety – Clarke's “hot blazing anger and frustration” envelope a luminous orb. The planes of brilliant reds and vermillion of the sky are layered, as the folds of any oyster’s mantle; holding the trepidation.

The painting, created in the context of 1967, references the anxiety as the Group Areas Act led to Simon’s Town being declared a whites-only suburb. The anticipation of displacement calcified in the community.

Artwork photograph that shows Ezrom Legae’s bronze sculpture ‘Face’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, sitting on a white surface.

Baroque pearls, so named after the French word meaning 'irregularly shaped', can range from subtle teardrop shapes to totally non-spherical mutations. Ezrom Legae’s Face reminds me of this, rounded in its irregularity, organically geometric.

Seemingly turned over and over in the artist’s hands in its terracotta draft, “one becomes aware that an ordinary physical substance is being transformed into something spiritual and meaningful," EJ de Jager wrote of Legae’s work.

Disturbed by the oppression and the degradation of his people under apartheid and post-apartheid, Legae noted of the intentions of his practice, “People can change, but masters cannot. Change doesn’t happen overnight.”

A mollusc can process a vulnerability in four months, but more often, it can take many years. Revisiting the intrusion again and again, coating it once more to soften the disturbance.

For ninety-two days, Sophie Calle records the anticipation of meeting a lover, only to be met with heartbreak when he doesn’t show up. Exquisite Pain documents the pearl of her grief, transforming each time she re-tells the story. Of her process, Calle considers the final product: “I live the happy moments, the sad ones, I exploit for artistic reasons, to turn them into a piece."

Once believed to be the tears of Eve or Aphrodite, pearls are created out of tremendous discomfort which is sublimated into something iridescent, of high value.

Installation photograph that shows a book from Sophie Calle’s installation ‘Exquisite Pain’ resting on a forward slanting wall-mounted shelf.

A pearl’s iridescence is created by the overlapping of consecutive layers of nacre (calcium carbonate), which refracts light that falls on its surface.

These numerous bands, which wrap around the vulnerability, interfere with different wavelengths of light from different angles, creating luster.

Jo Ractliffe’s photographic print ‘Love’s Body’ depicts the face of a deceased dog protruding from a blanket in a partially uncovered dirt grave.

I didn’t have that kind of moment, of parting... I suppose when you lose something or someone very special. He was so present in various parts of my life over the last ten years, spatially – the way that I moved in the house, in the garden, so much in my life was governed by his great big body.
– Jo Ractliffe

An excerpt from a conversation with Jo Ractliffe, Josh Ginsburg, and Francisco Berzunza, held in person and online in preparation for You to Me, Me to You, 1 June 2023.

David Goldblatt's monochrome photograph's monochrome photograph '“Lashing” shovels retrieved from underground. Every grain of sand in the yellow tailings dumps that made the Witwatersrand landscape and every grain of gold that made its wealth, came from a rock off a black man’s shovel underground. Central Salvage Yard, Randfontein Estates, Randfontein, 1966' shows a heap of shovels.

The pearl is a demonstration on how time and repetition can transmute pain into beauty, not by erasing the original wound, but by giving it new meaning through successive layers of reflection and refraction.

It is the opposite of a hole, it is the calcification of ruptured space.

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