Sophie Calle has spent a 40-year career peering into absences. In Copenhagen, the results are emotional

Sophie Calle is many things: a detective, a voyeur, a philosopher, a director. But most of all, she’s a storyteller (seen, not least, in her portfolio for Wallpaper* in 2020). In her latest exhibition, ‘Something Missing?’ at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, that story is about absence – the things we lose, the things we fail to notice, the things we never had.

‘It’s not only the gaze that interests me,’ Calle states in a video made specifically for the exhibition by the Louisiana Channel, ‘it’s also the disappearance. Things finishing: a man that leaves, a mother that dies, a painting that’s stolen.’ For Calle, absence is generative. It was, in fact, her father’s absence that drove her to art. ‘I always wanted to seduce him... that he would be proud of me,’ she admits. ‘I decided to try to enter his sphere of admiration.’ The results are visible here in works dating from 1979 to 2023, spanning a four-decade-plus career of turning voids into vantage points.

The show opens with Because (2018-2023), a series of framed felt sheets embroidered with text. I survey each one with the distinct feeling that something is indeed missing until a directive scribbled on the wall catches my attention: ‘You can lift up the curtains! S.C.’ The text, I realise, is a qualifier for the photo that’s hidden behind it, a reason for taking it, acting variably as a punch and a punchline (one sad, the next funny, and so on…), though at times they converge: ‘Because revenge is a dish best served cold,’ states one, before a lift of the felt reveals two gravestones; the mother’s monument towering over the father’s in posthumous settling of scores.

Calle’s wit continues in the next room where, in a curatorial bait-and-switch, she has installed a sturdy leather bench – the kind found in the Louvre or the National Gallery – to encourage lingering. Yet, what’s on view is what cannot be seen. Instead, we’re invited to study photos of Picasso works swaddled in protective paper during Covid lockdowns. The series is the result of an invitation from the Musée Picasso to respond to the master’s work, an encounter Calle found too overwhelming to face head-on. In a deeply Freudian gesture (not least because Picasso harbored a lifelong fear of blindness), she symbolically sterilises his work, allowing his mythos to be neutralised while renegotiating the space between image and spectre.

In one of her most poignant series, The Blind (1986), Calle asked people born without sight to describe their image of beauty. The responses read like poetry: ‘The most beautiful thing I ever saw is the sea, the sea going out so far you lose sight of it,’ writes one response, framed alongside a portrait of the subject and a photo of what they described. The images themselves are often mundane – white sheets, a patch of grass, a sheep – but in playing text against image, Calle initiates a wistful dance between subjective and objective worlds.

This tension is the engine of her work; by emphasising the distance between what is said and what is shown, Calle exposes the very architecture of longing, a framework defined by what is missing. In Voir la mer (2011) she tries to bridge this gap, filming people in Istanbul who have lived their lives by the water but have never actually seen the sea. We approach these films through a corridor lined with photographs of statues with closed or weathered eyes, but since a statue cannot see in any case, they act as monuments to a kind of frustrated desire. In the film, we watch from behind as these people encounter the ocean for the first time. When they turn to face the camera, their eyes often wet with tears, we become aware of our own voyeurism, unable to ever look through the eyes of another. Like the statues, we are left staring at the surface of a depth we can witness, but never inhabit.

Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished (2023) lifts the mood with its display of abandoned projects. Calle does so with an unflinching unsentimentality – projects stamped with the reason for their failing, which varies from ‘too late’ to ‘loss of interest’ and the more comical ‘infernal’. In their failure, they lay bare the imaginative leap we make when we turn life into art. When a project comes to an end, its components lose their sacred status and are reverted to quotidian matter – receipts, holiday photos, Google searches – and Calle estimates that we might, too. ‘The almost finished is life,’ said Picasso. For Calle, it might also be found in discarded drafts and false starts; in the gap between record and experience that she’s spent a career trying to glimpse.

‘Sophie Calle, Something Missing?’ until 6 September 2026 at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen

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