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Actes Sud

    Vik Muniz: Imaginaria
    Sophie Calle: True Stories
    • 2023

      First published in French in 1994 and now expanded in this first English-language edition, "True Stories" features a collection of short autobiographical texts and photographs by Sophie Calle. Known for drawing from her own life, Calle presents a work that serves as both a visual memoir and a meditation on the significance of photographs and personal belongings. The initial section reflects on various objects—like a shoe and a postcard—and muses on the artist's body, exemplified in "The Love Letter," where Calle describes commissioning a love letter from a public scribe, highlighting the blend of intimacy and distance in her work. The second section, "The Husband," recounts ten episodes from her first marriage, mixing humor, eroticism, and sadness, such as the amusing anecdote of a date that was a year late. The book also includes a series of autobiographical tales and concludes with three interconnected stories titled "Monique." This edition features five new photo-text presentations, marking the first English translation of Calle's poignant and fragmentary exploration of her life. Calle, born in 1953, is a renowned French writer and artist, with notable works including "The Address Book" and "Blind."

      Sophie Calle: True Stories
    • 2020

      As part of Grand Arles Express, with which the Lambert Collection has been associated since its inception in 2016, the famous Brazilian artist Vik Muniz returns to the papal city eight years after his major solo show to present Imaginaria, a series of works that have never been seen in Europe. Exhibited at the Lambert Collection, it comprises fifteen photographs featuring saints as depicted by great artists, from Simon Vouet's Saint Agnes to Philippe de Champaigne's Saint Augustine and Jose de Ribera's Saint Sebastian. In this new series, Muniz continues his exploration of the fascination with saints through the history of their representation in art and, consequently, the relationship between art works and the idea of the sacred.Composed of installations using everyday objects in incongruous situations (wire, sugar, ketchup, toys and cut-out magazines), Vik Muniz's photography reproduces images from collective memory and questions the notions of originality and copies. By audaciously re-appropriating icons of art history and the media world, the artist proposes a new relationship to images whose meaning and originality seems to have been exhausted by their reproduction and global diffusion.

      Vik Muniz: Imaginaria