“Sophie Calle Something Missing” at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

It’s been several years since the exhibition, but I still can’t understand why the Brooklyn Museum let a comedian from Netflix curate a show about How much do you hate Pablo Picasso?. Some will probably disagree with me, but I don’t feel that online popularity provides enough qualifications to try and take down one of the greatest artists of all time. Should we let MrBeast do a video essay on whether Federico Fellini is overrated? I had recently read Hock Tuah’s withering treatise on Virginia Woolf.

Sophie Calle (b. 1953), on the other hand, is eminently qualified to deconstruct Picasso, and she does so in “Sophie Calle: Something Missing?”, a new exhibition that fills the entire West Wing of the Louisiana Museum. Picasso is in lockdown— her collection of works that appeared around the Musée Picasso in Paris at that strange time in world history, when works, like our faces, were covered with improvised coverings to protect them from unseen forces — is one of seven series presented at Hemlebeek. In all, the show spans over 300 individual parts across photography, text and video, covering nearly 40 years of work.

The blind man (1986) was pivotal to her acquisition of the Picasso Museum in 2023. In this early series, Calle asked 23 people born blind about their image of beauty. It outlines its format for pairing words with pictures and immediately shows how effective it is. Blind No. 4 (1986) highlights the answer “Green is beautiful. Because every time I like something, I’m told it’s green.” This is paired with a framed picture of grass that will shock you with its simplicity. You’ll be seriously looking for more out there, wondering if our ability to see is some kind of defect.

The response was explored in See the sea (to see the sea) (2011), the only video work in the show. In it, Kale finds migrant workers from inside Türkiye and brings them to the Black Sea, telling them not to look up until they reach the sea. wateredge. Then they turn around. This silent piece is inspired by Rückenfigur’s paintings that allowed the viewer to bask in the glory of nature during the Romantic era, and the facial reveal is not only emotional, but also breaks the fourth wall. The old man, who has waited his whole life to see this, looks at you accusingly. The little girl almost shrugs, in a way that makes you feel silly for thinking she’ll like it.

Why take pictures at all? The answers lie in because (2018-2023), a series that combines the photograph with a hanging felt panel. Embroidered on felt is why the photo was taken. Real fake (2018) shows an image of artificial flowers in a museum with the caption “No need to touch, they are fake.” Reason: “Because you could replace the word ‘fake’ with the word ‘real’ and the meaning would be exactly the same.” It is strange to describe the imperfection of these flowers, which necessitates the sign, because Kali’s work has more or less anticipated my doing so. Among those missing in her work are us.

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