ExhibitionMarch 24, 2022
The Ghosts of Orsay. Sophie Calle and her guest Jean-Paul Demoule
As part of the Contemporary Readings program and until June 12, 2022, the Musée d'Orsay presents the exhibition "Les Fantômes D'orsay. Sophie Calle et son invité Jean-Paul Demoule" (The Ghosts of Orsay. Sophie Calle and her guest Jean-Paul Demoule).
In 1978, the Gare d'Orsay and its hotel were deserted. Construction work on the future museum had not yet begun. At that time, Sophie Calle occupied room 501 of the hotel, where she spent several months (before her departure to Venice) prefiguring what she did not know would be the exhibition presented today. During this stay, she feels the desolation of a place, like an archaeological space where everything has been abandoned. She takes photos, invites her friends, gathers documents, objects (old keys, signs, broken telephones), client files that are so many open lives, notes addressed to a hotel employee named Oddo, whose identity she imagines. During her stay, she photographed: the abandonment, the relics, the dark corridors... without imagining that 40 years later, these photographs and memories would be part of an exhibition.
Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at Orsay, was the one who proposed this exhibition to Sophie Calle after she told him at a dinner party about the beginning of her artistic history. "I told him, as a joke, that I knew his field better than he did and told him the beginning of my story in this abandoned hotel that later became a museum, and how, in 1978, wandering around Paris, a little lost after years of travel, I pushed, almost out of habit, a little door that gave way.... I had only two boxes left in my studio at the time, with "Orsay" written on them. Donatien wanted to see them and then suggested that I do something with them."
"Les fantômes d'Orsay" is a work by Sophie Calle, weaving a permanent back and forth between her beginnings and all her creation: finding the diversity of forms she takes, from photography to poetry, from ready-made to composition, collaboration, and her unique ability to weave stories, to make together with the public a permanently personal journey and see the multiplicity of a place, of a story.
Visitors to the museum will return to the now-defunct hotel, just as Sophie Calle immersed herself in the museum after experiencing the hotel. It will reveal the ghostly ensemble of the Musée d'Orsay, where the ghosts are those of all the people and works that have passed through it; allowing visitors to feel the depth of a place and the very texture of the museum, both immediately present, seemingly temporary, and yet which has changed so much over the forty years of Sophie Calle's life.
In 1978, the Gare d'Orsay and its hotel were deserted. Construction work on the future museum had not yet begun. At that time, Sophie Calle occupied room 501 of the hotel, where she spent several months (before her departure to Venice) prefiguring what she did not know would be the exhibition presented today. During this stay, she feels the desolation of a place, like an archaeological space where everything has been abandoned. She takes photos, invites her friends, gathers documents, objects (old keys, signs, broken telephones), client files that are so many open lives, notes addressed to a hotel employee named Oddo, whose identity she imagines. During her stay, she photographed: the abandonment, the relics, the dark corridors... without imagining that 40 years later, these photographs and memories would be part of an exhibition.
Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at Orsay, was the one who proposed this exhibition to Sophie Calle after she told him at a dinner party about the beginning of her artistic history. "I told him, as a joke, that I knew his field better than he did and told him the beginning of my story in this abandoned hotel that later became a museum, and how, in 1978, wandering around Paris, a little lost after years of travel, I pushed, almost out of habit, a little door that gave way.... I had only two boxes left in my studio at the time, with "Orsay" written on them. Donatien wanted to see them and then suggested that I do something with them."
"Les fantômes d'Orsay" is a work by Sophie Calle, weaving a permanent back and forth between her beginnings and all her creation: finding the diversity of forms she takes, from photography to poetry, from ready-made to composition, collaboration, and her unique ability to weave stories, to make together with the public a permanently personal journey and see the multiplicity of a place, of a story.
Visitors to the museum will return to the now-defunct hotel, just as Sophie Calle immersed herself in the museum after experiencing the hotel. It will reveal the ghostly ensemble of the Musée d'Orsay, where the ghosts are those of all the people and works that have passed through it; allowing visitors to feel the depth of a place and the very texture of the museum, both immediately present, seemingly temporary, and yet which has changed so much over the forty years of Sophie Calle's life.
