French conceptual artist Sophie Calle, whose current installation, Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself), is on exhibit in Montreal. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images)Heaven help Sophie Calle should she ever have a functional relationship. For 30 years, the French conceptual artist has wrung career-defining art out of the bitter tears of her ruined affairs. This habit has reached a kind of apotheosis with her latest piece, a sprawling installation called Prenez soin de vous, or Take Care of Yourself. France’s entry for 2007’s Venice Biennale, it will occupy Montreal’s DHC/ART Foundation until Oct. 19.

In 2005, Calle received a breakup e-mail from her boyfriend. It’s a silly letter, full of evasions and self-justifications, and it ends with the line, “Prenez soin de vous.” After showing the letter to a friend, Calle realized that if she was really going to take care of herself, some group therapy might help. She sent the letter to 107 other women and asked them to dissect it, each according to their own professional expertise.

In the critical writing on Calle’s work, much is made of her blurring the lines between the private and the public. I disagree: there’s no blurring, just outright erasure. Not all of her projects have been about her breakups, but whatever the content, a total disregard for privacy (both her own and others’) has been her modus operandi since the very beginning.

Now 55, Calle fell into art making by accident. In her mid-20s, after some post-university travelling, the rootless Calle took to following random strangers around Paris. Coincidentally, she was introduced to one such stranger at a party. He mentioned that he was going to Venice. Unbeknownst to him, she tailed him there, with camera and notepad, and thus a career was born. The resulting piece was called Suite Vénitienne. (Her subject ended up being wise but amenable to her game.)

Other projects did not involve such gentle complicity. In Hotel Suite (1981), Calle got a job as a chambermaid so she could snoop through hotel guests’ luggage and document them. For Address Book (1983), she found an address book in the street; before mailing it back to its owner, she photocopied it. She interviewed the addressees about their phonebook friend, publishing the results in 28 daily installments in a major French newspaper. The infuriated subject, a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry – how’s that for irony? – retaliated by insisting that the paper publish a nude photo of Calle. Calle and the paper complied. (Partly; they cropped out her head.) Calle was apparently delighted by this exchange; Mr. Baudry remains resentful to this day.

While other pieces aren’t confrontational at all – like her collaboration with the novelist Paul Auster or her interviews with blind people about beauty – Calle’s breakup pieces offer the keenest insight into her work. Prenez soin de vous has two immediate forbears. The first is a feature-length video made with Greg Shephard called Double-Blind/No Sex Last Night. In it, both Calle and Shephard have their own cameras, and they record their relationship, which unfolds (and then sort of refolds, and then just completely implodes) during a road trip from New York to San Francisco. Stylistically, the video has two modes: its travelogue mode plays out as a photomontage, whereas interactions between Calle and Shephard occur in “real time,” with voiceover narration throughout.

Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself) was inspired by a boyfriend's breakup e-mail. (Jean-Baptiste Mondino/DHC/ART Foundation)Things begin terribly: Shephard is listless, and pathologically noncommittal (mademoiselle certainly has a type). This prompts Calle to be goading, resentful and passive-aggressive. Shephard and Calle don’t narrate the film so much as narrate their respective states of mind. With each rest stop, Calle records their unmade bed, and reports coldly: “No sex last night.” Amazingly, they marry (at a drive-in chapel, no less) and then consummate the marriage. But after a year, Calle discovers that Shephard has been sending passionate love letters to a woman in New York, and the whole thing finally disintegrates. What Calle thought of the whole affair is hinted at by the fact that, even in its theatrical release as a documentary (it screened at a couple of European film festivals), she gave him equal billing as co-director. What Shephard thought of it is unrecorded.

The other breakup piece is called Exquisite Pain. Calle won a bursary to visit Japan in 1983, and arranged to meet up with her boyfriend in Delhi once she was done. When Calle arrived, she was greeted with a telegram: her boyfriend had met someone else while she was away; it was over. The installation occurs in two parts: the first are photographs and mementos of her stay in Japan. Each artifact is stamped with a countdown (“92 days to unhappiness,” “91 days to unhappiness,” etc.) culminating with the photo of the empty Delhi hotel room.

The second part was completed in 2003. Calle had long considered this the most painful moment of her life, and started interviewing others about their traumas, most of which were more awful: the sudden suicide of a lover; the death of a father; a man who lost, one after another, his job, his wife, his house and finally, his dog. The transcriptions of these interviews are embroidered on banners, and arranged as diptychs: an interviewee’s trauma, and Calle’s own retelling of her breakup. With each testimonial, Calle’s description of her trauma gets shorter and more general, finishing with a blank panel, a symbol of Calle’s increasing sense of exhaustion and perspective.

This expository mode earns Calle repeated comparisons to other female conceptual and performance artists, most often to Tracey Emin, whose frank sexual disclosures via felt appliqué made her an international art star in the 1990s. But such comparisons are glib and inaccurate. Emin’s confessions are neurotic expulsions of self-hatred. Calle might be confessional, but she is neither vulgar, nor neurotic, nor self-loathing – if anything, her art is a testament to a pretty resilient persona. Her work is a game of sorts, and she recognizes the need to subject herself to the same game in which she involves others.

Part of the installation Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself). (DHC/ART Foundation)This is why, I suspect, she was so delighted with Pierre Baudry’s nude-photo revenge: she exposed him, and was, in turn, willing to be exposed herself. That is what makes Prenez soin de vous so fascinating, and such a deft summation of her practice. Her lover is exposed in the form of his letter, but ultimately, Calle and this mob of women expose themselves through their responses. The installation achieves its power through repetition and accretion, each reiteration of the letter increasing the viewer’s sense of a mass revenging.

With Prenez soin de vous, Calle once again achieves perspective and closure through other people; in Calle’s words, they “review, comment, play, dance, sing” their way through this silly letter. A proofreader highlights her ex’s bad grammar; an etiquette specialist tut-tuts his indiscretion; two rabbis debate his character; several actresses, including the legendary Jeanne Moreau, perform it, pop singers (such as Feist) sing it, and so forth.

The single most powerful response to Calle’s letter is provided courtesy of an archivist, who suggests that copies of the letter be made available to every visitor (I still have mine). This act opens up the entire exhibition, and disseminates it far beyond the limits of the gallery. It’s no longer a closed system of transactions between Calle and her chosen women. Now, the viewer is directly involved as well. We can invent our own form of interpretive catharsis. We are now part of Calle’s work – but then, we always have been.

Controversy dogs Calle’s work; one wonders whether it would be known at all apart from its invasive shock. On the other hand, that invasion is a reflection of our own voyeuristic desires – Calle is basically a paparazzo, only she doesn’t bother celebrities. And the fact of celebrity is what excuses our lust for the petty details of the lives of the famous. Because their jobs are public, the assumption goes, their lives must also be public.

There is no such excuse in Calle’s oeuvre; all we are left with is the prurient desire to invade others’ intimacies. In that, she is an eerie predictor of the entire reality television phenomenon. But reality TV offers only limited material rewards, and no redemption. Redemption is essential for Calle, and it comes in the form of the very public airing of her dirty laundry.

Prenez soin de vous (Take Care of Yourself) runs at the DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montreal until Oct. 19.

Sholem Krishtalka is a writer based in Toronto.