The Sleepers

In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player, and several painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversation once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits, and dreams, as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: was it a curiosity, a game, a seduction, an artwork, a job? The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and brief texts.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.