Sophie Calle & Simon Starling at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal

Simon Starling and Sophie Calle both create work that tells a story, but in most other respects they are polar opposites. He makes cerebral projects steeped in research, whereas her art is full of personal and emotional journeys. It’s a bit of an odd coincidence to have such flagrant binary stereotypes of male and female approaches so starkly juxtaposed, but both have impressive and engaging practices, so I was eager to check out their parallel exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal.



Sophie Calle, Voir la Mer, 2011 (courtesy: Galerie Perrotin and Paula Cooper Gallery; photo: Caroline Champetier)

I have enjoyed Calle’s practice since first learning about it in my early twenties (let’s face it, she is like an empathetic rune for romantic young women studying art and art history), but I was a little “meh” about the two relatively recent works on exhibition here. Voir la mer from 2011 – where the French artist brought inner city residents of Istanbul to the sea for the first time – even came off as slightly condescending. Calle is best when her works document her own performativity and the subject is personal.

Starling’s career had begun to kick off outside of Glasgow just when I arrived in Scotland to start my MFA. This retrospective, titled Metamorphology, provides an opportunity to see how much more complex and dense his practice has become over the years. His work often rests on a similar methodology involving the research and re-creation of the journey/ecology of specific objects in history: cars, boats, bicycles, steel, marble, modern art, etc. In later works such as Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima), the interweaving stories and metaphors prove somewhat richer.

I was sorry to miss Sophie Calle’s artist talk last month, but this year’s Max and Iris Stern Symposium, entitled Every Object Has a Story: Art, Research and the Reinvention of Things, is inspired by Starling’s practice and the artist will be among the presenters at the end of March.


Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal: http://www.macm.org/en/
Simon Starling: Metamorphology continues until May 10.
Sophie Calle: For the Last and First Time continues until May 10.


Susannah Wesley is an artist and curator living in Montreal. She has been a member of the collaborative duo Leisure since 2004 and from 1997-2000 was part of the notorious British art collective the Leeds13. Formerly Director at Battat Contemporary in Montreal, she holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Art History from Concordia University. She is Akimblog's Montreal correspondent and can be followed @susannahwesley1 on Twitter.