Sophie Calle’s ‘Overshare’ Exhibition Takes Visitors on a Journey Through the Intimate

The exhibition at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art examines social media expressions before there was social media.

Between following strangers, inviting people to sleep in her bed and filming her mother’s dying moments, Sophie Calle has done it all. In the retrospective exhibition “Overshare,” Calle asks, how far does the relationship between artist and viewer really go? The answer is further than you think.

“Overshare” is Sophie Calle’s first art exhibition to tour North America. Starting its journey at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, it covers five decades of her work. Though it initially debuted in Minneapolis in October 2024, the career-spanning exhibition made its way to the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in January 2026. It is featured there through May 24.  

“When I learned that the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Henrietta Holdisch, who’s their chief curator, were planning this large-scale show of Sophie’s work, and it’s the first major exhibition of hers in North America, I immediately knew that I wanted to be involved in some capacity,”  said Courtenay Finn, OCMA’s chief curator and director of programs.

“Overshare” captures a lifetime as much as it does a state of mind. Starting with photographs and accompanying text, it shifts into physical and eventually video mediums. The exhibition provides an interesting window into behavior that both predates and predicts social media.

“Sophie might be the first oversharer in the sense that she’s been making this work since before social media existed,” Finn said, “since before we all got online and started following other people and sharing the intimate details of our lives in a format that’s very similar to her work.”

Calle has been making art since the 1970s. Her work often interrogates the relationship between artist, subject and viewer. One such example is her exhibition in 2007 titled “Take Care of Yourself,” which featured 107 interpretations and performances of a break-up email she received. In 2010, she was the recipient of the Hasselblad Award, granted to photographers who are recognized for major achievements. In 2024, she was a recipient of the Praemium Imperiale, an international art prize awarded by the royal family of Japan.

Though Calle is originally from France, California is and continues to be deeply important to her work, according to Finn.

“Northern California is the place where she decided to become an artist, where she became friends with artists and writers in the Bay Area,” Finn said.

The exhibition is broken up into four sections: “The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning.” “The Spy” features black and white photographs placed next to typewritten text in individual frames. Two pieces in this section of the exhibit, titled “The Hotel” and “The Shadow,”  tell two separate stories. In the former, Calle follows a stranger around Venice. In the latter, she makes her mother hire a private investigator to follow her. The exhibit then showcases objects from her life such as her bed and letters. The exhibition ends with video and image tributes to both of her parents. One section of “The Protagonist” features objects from Calle’s room listed and numbered with context provided. Another features Calle’s email correspondence with a man who wished to sleep in her bed as a method of getting over heartbreak.

In “The End” and “The Beginning,” Calle examines her relationship with her parents both in life and death. One segment of these sections involves her speaking about being sent to therapy by her father. Another features her musings on her father’s heart attack, her mother’s diary and the deaths of her parents several years apart. The exhibit ends with a video of her dying mother next to traveling ice caps in the North Pole.

Also included in “Overshare” are her iconic works, “The Sleepers” (1979) and

“Suite Vénitienne” (1980), as well as an unfinished video project she never completed, but spent over 10 years grappling with the material. The video features people withdrawing money from an ATM in Minneapolis.

“We’re used to the memoir, the autobiography, the tell all. But it’s also still authored and it’s still her version of the story that she wants to share,” Finn said. “She’s really asking questions about what is commonplace to share? When have we … crossed the boundary and overshared?”