Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi
(Weddings, Break-ups and Funerals Included)
October 16, 2026–February 7, 2027
Rome 00196
Italy
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm
What shape does an ending take? What happens before it, and after? How can we pass through it—and how might we hold on to it?
These are some of the questions behind Sophie Calle. Matrimoni, Rotture e Funerali inclusi, the major exhibition that MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts is devoting to one of the most original and influential figures in international contemporary art.
Curated by Simona Antonacci, the exhibition runs from October 16, 2026 to February 7, 2027. It is the largest solo exhibition of the French artist's work ever held in Italy. It brings together eight projects created between 1978 and 2026, along with a new permanent installation at Rome's Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners.
Photographs, texts, videos, installations and autobiographical stories form a circular route through more than forty years of work. Together they explore the boundaries between public and private, reality and fiction, art and life. At its heart are life's great themes: love and separation, grief and memory, desire and absence, failure and the chance to begin again.
Calle works in a spare, rigorous language. She turns personal and shared experiences into art through a method entirely her own, built on precise rules, gestures and rituals. Her works include a countdown to the end of a relationship, an attempt to capture her mother's last breath, an inventory of unfinished projects and encounters with people seeing the sea for the first time. Each one becomes a way of asking what ends, what remains and what might still begin. The exhibition shows how consistent her practice has been. Loss, absence, and even failure become the raw material of her work, and through it they find a new form, meaning, and place.
The exhibition extends beyond the museum's walls with MAXXI's new permanent public artwork, created in collaboration with the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome. Here lie the secrets of the passerby of the cemetery of the artists and poets is an installation by Sophie Calle that guards the secrets of visitors, buried beneath a gravestone in the cemetery. The work was unveiled on October 11 with a participatory performance in which people were invited to confide their secrets and symbolically bury them.
A catalogue edited by Simona Antonacci and Pippo Ciorra accompanies the exhibition. It includes texts by Simona Antonacci, Sophie Calle, Pippo Ciorra, Yvonne A. Mazurek and Riccardo Venturi, and is published by Skira in separate Italian and English editions.
