Don’t Miss Sophie Calle’s: Something Missing?
Sophie Calle's first UK show since 2009 opens at Turner on 3 Oct 2026.
Here's what's in it and why you shouldn’t miss it.
Credit: © Sophie Calle / DACS, London, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Sophie Calle is bringing her first UK show in 17 years to Margate.
Turner has landed a big one. Sophie Calle: Something Missing? opens on 3 Oct 2026 and runs until 24 Jan 2027, and it's the French artist's first institutional exhibition in the UK since 2009.
If you don't know her work yet, you will by November. Calle isone of those artists people become slightly obsessed with.
Who is sophie calle?
Bornin Paris in 1953, Calle has spent five decades turning love, loss, guilt, fear and embarrassment into photography, video and text. She has been a detective, a sociologist and a storyteller, often all in the same room.
She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and won the Praemium Imperiale in 2024.
Her work sits in the Met, MoMA, the Pompidou and Tate.
Credit © Yves Géant
What's in the Something Missing? exhibition?
The show spans 1986 to 2024 and absence is the thread running through all of it.
Calle has said it's the things that are missing that drive her work, a mother who has gone, a lover who leaves, an idea that never arrives.
In The Blind (1986), she asked 23 people born without sight to describe their idea of beauty. Voir la Mer (2011) is a multi-channel video work filming residents of Istanbul seeing the sea for the first time, which feels really poignant to have here in Margate.
There's also On the Hunt (2017 to 2024), a century-long record of what people say they want in a partner, starting with newspaper personal ads from 1895 and ending with Tinder messages.
Credit: Camilla Stephan / Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
The Turner connection
There is a really lovely connection in having her work here in Margate.
Purloined (Turner) (1998 to 2013) came out of Calle's long investigation into stolen masterpieces.
She asked curators, guards and gallery staff to describe two JMW Turner paintings from memory after they were famously stolen while on loan from Tate.
Clarrie Wallis, Director of Turner, has called Calle "one of the most distinctive artists of our time".
Don’t miss out on Sophie Calle at Turner.
Tuesdays to Sundays and bank holidays, 11am to 5pm. Free.
And if you want to know more about what’s happening in Margate, subscribe to our free weekly what’s on newsletter.
