Appointment with Sigmund Freud, Sophie Calle, 2005

Calle, a onetime stripper in Paris, is an avant-garde conceptual French artist whose work has appeared at the Gardner and the ICA in Boston.  She was invited to combine her own objects with those of Freud in the house in London where he lived briefly after fleeing Vienna in 1939 and where he died of cancer.  The photograph of his overcoat and her wedding dress is a jarring memento mori, confronting the reader with the transience of life and the inevitability of death.