The new show, which runs through October, brings together photographs, video installations and mixed‑media pieces that trace Calle’s preoccupation with what is not there – from the death of her parents to unfinished ideas she deliberately abandoned.
Calle, now 72, has built a reputation since the early 1980s for turning everyday encounters into intimate art objects, whether by inviting strangers to sleep in her bed, posing as a hotel maid to catalogue guests’ belongings, or tracking a party‑goer across Venice in a raincoat for a 1980 project.
‘Something Missing?’ assembles works such as the 1986 series The Blind, in which blind participants described their own visions of beauty, and the 2023 Voir la Mer, which filmed Turkish families seeing the sea for the first time. New, unfinished pieces from a 2023 series are also on view, giving them life while the artist is still alive.
In a candid interview conducted in her long‑time Paris flat, Calle said she is “obsessed with absence” and that creating distance from painful events – like filming her mother’s final moments in 2006 – helps her cope. She added that she now speaks more about death, having already commissioned her own headstone and even an obituary she later edited.
The exhibition also reflects a personal turning point: after her father’s death in 2015, Calle briefly stopped making art, travelled, and then returned to the studio, saying she “got bored and started again.” The Margate show, therefore, functions as both a retrospective and a statement of continued vitality.
Calle’s reluctance to follow strangers for days now, citing a lack of energy, marks a shift from the relentless surveillance that defined much of her early work. Yet she remains fascinated by the act of seeing and being seen, a tension that underpins the entire programme.
Critics have long debated whether Calle’s methods are inventive or invasive. The Turner Contemporary installation, which occupies four floors of the museum, invites visitors to confront that debate head‑on, offering a space where absence is both the subject and the medium.