look inside$48.00

clothbound, 6 x 8 in.
304 pages, 176 bw illus
978-1-938221-32-3
forthcoming December 2024
preorders ship November

code SLEEP gets 20% off

PDF Press Release

Selected by Cultured and Hyperallergic for their fall lists of must-read books.

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.

A novella-like chronicle in image and text both magnifies the original 1979 installation and deepens an understanding of Calle’s ouevre.

Unlike the original installation, this artist’s book iteration of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novella-like report that Calle narrates from the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom. The sleepers are chronicled in text and photos, as if in real time, as they inhabit the bed, along with their answers to Calle’s candid questioning. The Sleepers is as much an outré report on the nature and act of sleeping as it is something like an eight-day-long dream.

Many seeds of Calle’s subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her generative and unrelenting curiosity. But in this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too: they speak with reciprocal candor, presaging her insouciance and resolve as she detonates boundaries in her later work.

Translated into English for the first time, The Sleepers is a singular artist’s book, designed specifically for this publication.

As the complete work of The Sleepers has been published only in France, Siglio commissioned lauded translator Emma Ramadan to render this work into English for the first time. As with Siglio’s other collaborations with Calle—The Address Book (2012), Suite Vénitienne (2015), and The Hotel (2021)—The Sleepers is an artist’s book, devised as both object and experience. Clothbound, soft and pillow-like, the book cover unfolds as it opens. The subtle reveal of the swiss binding suggests the “book as bed,” pages as sheets. Intended to converse materially and visually with The Hotel, The Sleepers is equally seductive: an intimate invitation to the reader to step inside a private space, an invitation not unlike the one issued to her sleepers: give her some time, occupy her space, share it with her, for the duration, and observe.

Sophie CallE (b. 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose work often fuses conceptual art and Oulipian-like constraints, investigatory methods and fictional constructs, the plundering of autobiography and the artful composition of self. Using a range of media—books, photography, film, writing, performance, and installation—Calle explores the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret, and the unsaid. Desire and voyeurism are often agents to expose the multiplicity of truth as well as its absence. Most recently, she was invited to occupy the Musée national Picasso-Paris where in 2023 she staged the large-scale, multifarious solo exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne. A limited retrospective Overshare opens at the Walker Art Center in October.

The Address Book, The Hotel, and Suite Vénitienne