When Monique Sindler was dying in her bed in Paris in 2006, Sophie Calle, her daughter and the renowned French conceptual artist, set up a video camera and began taping. The artist, 60, has explained that her reason for the camera was that she didn’t want to be out of the room when the moment of death came. She wanted to hear her mother’s last word and see her last breath, but she had heard that the dying often wait until nobody is around to let go.

“I was afraid I wouldn’t be there if she had a last thing to tell me,” she said this spring in a Skype interview from her home near Paris, where she has mounted a taxidermy giraffe head on the wall and named it after her mother. “The camera made me feel restful because I could sleep in the other room or go out and buy food. When I wasn’t there, I was still there.”

While Ms. Calle’s career often involves invading the privacy of others — copying someone’s lost address book and calling people in it and then publishing their remarks in a newspaper; posing as a chambermaid to photograph the messes left by guests; and exhibiting a breakup email from a romantic partner to elicit commentary from various female experts — she had never made her mother the sole subject of one of her voyeuristic projects.

“Finally,” Ms. Calle recalled her mother saying when she set up the camera, suggesting to her daughter and to anyone who came by and questioned it, that she was pleased that her turn as a subject had finally come, even if it was at the very end.