French artist Sophie Calle explores absence and loss ahead of new Margate exhibition

French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, 72, is preparing to open her first major UK exhibition in almost 20 years at Turner Contemporary in Margate. Titled "Something Missing?", the show brings together photographs, videos and installations created between 1986 and 2024, centred on the theme of absence — including her late parents, a former lover, and abandoned ideas.

Calle began making art at 26, partly to please her father, a doctor and collector of pop and conceptual art. Since the early 1980s she has built a reputation for work that is both intimate and detached, inviting strangers to sleep in her bed, posing as a hotel maid, and following people she did not know. In 1980 she tracked a man from Paris to Venice, photographing him without his knowledge.

Death and loss as recurring themes

When her mother was dying in 2006, Calle made a film about it, saying the project helped her cope emotionally with the loss. After her father's death in 2015, she briefly stopped making art before resuming. She says she now thinks about death more often as she grows older, and has already commissioned her own headstone.

The exhibition includes her 1986 series "The Blind", featuring people born without sight describing their idea of beauty, and 2011's "Voir la Mer", which captures residents of Istanbul seeing the sea for the first time.

Calle says she has always lived alone, though she has been with the same partner for 25 years. She has never made art about him, as the two signed an agreement stating he would leave her if she ever did. She also says she has never wanted children and values not having anyone depend on her.