Sophie Calle’s current exhibition at the Sabancı Museum, titled “For the Last and First Time,” invites audiences to ponder the different dimensions of the faculty of sight, the existence of which is so rarely contemplated and so often taken for granted
What Sophie Calle did for Istanbul’s Esenler district’s inhabitants was beyond price. Calle showed them the sea and while doing this, Caroline Champetier, renowned cinematographer, recorded them. Then Calle met with people who lost their sight and asked them what the last vision they remember was. She turned all of these into art and currently exhibits them at the Sabancı Museum in Emirgan.
The exhibition runs until Dec. 31 and features three parts. For the first part, titled “The Last Image,” Calle questioned 13 individuals who were blind from birth or who later lost their sight. For the second part, “Voir la Mer,” Calle portrayed individuals who lived in Istanbul but who encountered the sea for the first time. In the third section, “Two Quotations,” Calle recalled 1986 to give meaning to the exhibition and bid the viewer farewell.
The exhibition is a result of a long-time project. When Calle visited Istanbul for a project for the 2010 European Capital of Culture, she wanted to create something about Istanbul. Her assistant found the Altı Nokta Association for the Blind. Calle asked those blind people the last image they recalled seeing. Then she related their responses and photographed both the narrators and the narrated events.
It only took Calle two weeks to finish the project. “I interviewed two to three people a day,” she said.
Calle was inspired by a legend about Istanbul. According to the legend, the city was founded in the seventh century B.C. as a Greek colony. The first location the colonists saw after passing through the Straits of the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara was today’s Kadıköy, which became the ancient city of Chalcedon. Because of their choice of this area for the establishment of the colony in spite of the far more fertile land on the opposite shore, Chalcedon became known as the “city of the blind.”
(From Sabancı Museum-Sophie Calle exhibition)
The second section of the exhibition titled “Voir la Mer” features a significant “first time” in people’s lives. Sabancı Museum’s Director Nazan Ölçer explained the project: “One day, while we were speaking with Beral Madra and Sophie Calle, we said there were people in Istanbul who had never seen the sea.”
What are very significant in the videos that were shot by Champetier are the unseen faces of people. The persons chosen to participate in this project were selected with the help of the Esenler Municipality, which took in migrants from Eastern and Central Anatolia. “I was interested in the situation, but I did not want to do a documentary. I did not want to interview them. Those people who saw the sea for the first time may be poor or they never had the opportunity to see the sea. But I did not want to mention these things,” Calle said.
(From Sabancı Museum-Sophie Calle exhibition)
Calle does not want to be between them and the sea. That’s why Calle put herself behind the camera. She is not in front them. The audience can only see people’s backs. “I did not want to interfere,” added Calle.
In the third section, Calle returned to her text-based works. The audience sees two quotations from a project by Calle that goes back to 1986: “The most beautiful thing I ever saw is the sea, the sea going out so far you lose sight of it,” and, “In 1986, I met people who were born blind. I asked them what their image of beauty was. That was the first answer: a blind man telling me about the sea.”