This autumn, Turner Contemporary will present Sophie Calle: Something Missing?, the artist’s first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2009. Bringing together some of her most important work across photography, video and installation from 1986–2024, Something Missing? will introduce a new generation to her influential practice.
Over the past five decades, Calle has achieved international renown for addressing the big questions of human experience—from love, loss and longing, to guilt, fear and embarrassment—with equal parts poetry, wit, and conceptual rigour. Navigating public and private, control and chance, her works offer an irresistible glimpse into the innermost lives of friends, lovers, strangers—as well as that of Calle herself.
At the core of the exhibition is absence. As Calle has put it, it is ‘the things that are missing—my mother who is no longer here, a lover who leaves, an idea that doesn’t come’ that drive her. Across Turner’s galleries, this idea is explored through her signature use of photography and text-based work in which Calle variously assumes the roles of historian, sociologist, detective, philosopher and—above all—storyteller, pairing her own photographs with matter-of-fact first-person accounts.
A highlight of the exhibition is On the Hunt (2017–2024), in which she methodically compiled a record of the qualities most desired in a romantic partner over the period of more than a century. Beginning with personal ads dating back to 1895 and concluding with Tinder messages, the work extends Calle’s longstanding exploration of romantic desire from a compelling new perspective.
Visual encounter, or its absence, and the development of images in our memory is a recurring theme. In The Blind (1986), Calle invited 23 people who were born without sight to describe their idea of beauty. For the powerful multi-channel video installation Voir la Mer (2011) she filmed residents of Istanbul seeing the sea for the very first time. In Purloined (Turner) (1998–2013) – part of her wider investigation into the traces left by stolen masterpieces – Calle asked curators, guards and other museum staff to share their memories of two paintings by JMW Turner that were famously stolen while on loan from Tate.
Throughout the exhibition, Calle offers a fascinating insight into the motivations – and preoccupations – that are an inevitable part of an artist’s life. In her major new series Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished (2023), Calle collected the projects she began but, for various reasons, did not pursue: ‘the drafts, the attempts, the abandoned projects. To give life to my intentions. To finish the unfinished.’
Sophie Calle is one of the most distinctive artists of our time, whose work has influenced generations through its emotional honesty, conceptual precision, and wit. We are thrilled to present her first institutional exhibition in the UK in over fifteen years, offering audiences a rare opportunity to experience the extraordinary breadth of her remarkable practice.”
Clarrie Wallis, Director of Turner Contemporary
Sophie Calle: Something Missing? is organised by Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, in collaboration with Turner Contemporary, Margate and De Pont Museum, Tilburg. The exhibition is accompanied by an English-language catalogue featuring new essays by Laurie Anderson and Yves-Alain Bois, as well as a new interview with Sophie Calle by Édouard Louis.
Sophie Calle: Something Missing? is at Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate from 3 October 2026 until 23 January 2027. Find more information here.
