ROME.- Sophie Calle is bringing her deeply personal investigations of intimacy, memory, absence and loss to Rome this October, beginning with two unusual events that blur the boundaries between private ritual and public participation ahead of the opening of her major MAXXI exhibition.

On October 9 — Calle’s birthday — the French conceptual artist will present The Birthday Conference at the MAXXI Auditorium. Rather than asking visitors to purchase a conventional ticket, Calle has proposed a more personal form of admission: each member of the audience is invited to bring her a birthday present.

The gesture transforms what might otherwise have been a museum lecture into the kind of participatory experiment that has defined Calle’s practice for nearly five decades. The artist has said that she initially rejected MAXXI’s invitation to speak on her birthday, before realizing that she knew almost no one in Rome and might otherwise spend the evening alone.

Her solution was characteristic. Visitors become participants, the lecture becomes a birthday gathering, and the accumulated gifts may themselves enter the exhibition as material for a future work. If the roughly 210-seat auditorium is full, Calle plans to select gifts at random to open during the event. Some or all of the presents may subsequently be displayed when the exhibition opens.

Two days later, on October 11, Calle will move beyond the walls of MAXXI for a performance at Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners.





There she will inaugurate Here Lie the Secrets of the Travelers of the Cemetery of Artists and Poets, a permanent installation designed to receive and preserve the secrets of cemetery visitors. Participants may deposit a secret directly into the tomb or confide it to Calle before it is buried. They can speak in French or English if they want the artist to understand them, or use another language if they prefer that their words remain opaque even to her.

Both events anticipate Sophie Calle. Weddings, Breakups and Funerals Included, opening at MAXXI on October 16 and remaining on view through February 7, 2027. Curated by Simona Antonacci, the exhibition is described by the museum as the most extensive survey of Calle’s work ever organized in Italy.

The show brings together eight projects made between 1978 and 2026, alongside the new permanent cemetery installation, tracing an artistic practice built around endings and what remains after them.

Calle’s relationship with these themes reaches back to 1978, when she photographed gravestones in a California cemetery bearing stark inscriptions such as Mother and Father. Made before her formal emergence in the art world, the photographs were among her earliest experiments with the medium and introduced questions that would recur throughout her career: What does it mean for something to end? How do we live through disappearance? And what traces can be preserved?

Across the exhibition, those questions are explored through works dealing with romantic separation, death, unfinished projects and acts of remembrance. Among them are a countdown to the end of a love affair, Calle’s attempt to capture her mother’s final breath and projects revived after having once been abandoned.

Yet the exhibition is not exclusively about loss. MAXXI describes it as a circular narrative in which mourning and failure coexist with beginnings, desire, reconciliation and acts of sharing.

Born in Paris in 1953, Calle has spent much of her career collapsing distinctions between autobiography, conceptual art, photography, performance and social experiment. Since the late 1970s, she has repeatedly placed herself — and those around her — within carefully constructed situations that test the limits between private and public life, fact and fiction, observer and participant.

A major retrospective of her work was presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2003 before traveling to Berlin and Dublin. Calle represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007, received the Hasselblad Award in 2010 and was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2024.

Recent exhibitions have included Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center and the Orange County Museum of Art, Sophie Calle Chasse Gardée at Château La Coste and Something Missing? at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2026.

With the Rome project, Calle once again turns the rituals of ordinary life — birthdays, secrets, love affairs and funerals — into situations in which personal experience becomes both artistic material and an invitation for others to participate.