„THE CAMBODIAN ROOM. SITUATIONS WITH ANTOINE D’AGATA”

Antoine D'Agata, a photographer from Magnum Agency, is in Phom Penh (Cambodia). Drugs, sex and errance are his autobiographical subjects, but in Cambodia his artistic trail seems to reach an utmost point. After devoting his art to picture desolated landscapes and borderline realities all around the world, Antoine D'Agata focuses his art on body and flesh, in a narrow room. In Cambodia he spends many weeks locked in Lee's room. Antoine lives a kind of desperate and paradoxal "love story" with Lee, a prostitute, smoking dope and trying to take pictures of his intimate relationship with her. This film catches the hidden part of his art-life; his choice of living sex and drugs as both cure and conviction. An apocalyptic and sublime course, similar to the ones of other heretic artists of contemporary culture, from Kerouac to Artaud, from Bacon to Pasolini.

Antoine D'Agata was born in Marseilles in 1961. In 1983 he left France and lived abroad for ten years. In 1990 he was in New York, where he studied at the International Center of Photography with Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. In the same period, D'Agata worked as an editorial assistant for the Magnum Agency in New York. After his return to France in 1993 he took a break from photography until 1996. His first book of photographs, De mala Muerte was published in 1998 and the Gallerie Vu in Paris began distributing his work the following year. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. His exhibition "1001 Nuits" was held in 2003, the same year that he published "Vortex" and "Insomnia". In 2004 he joined the Magnum Photo Agency and published "Stigma." The same year saw his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde.

This film making experience led to his first feature length film Aka Ana, shot in Tokyo in 2006. Antoine D'Agata's art features a dualism and contraposition between dreams and reality, visionary nightmare and perception of the world, anguish and sexuality, poetry of the body and uncontrolled delirium of the mind, solitude and carnal sharing of pleasure, existential pain and vital eroticism. This artist's photography is extremely complex and reveals to the spectator his condition as a suffering individual, lost in a nothingness artificially created by man to deny the emptiness that surrounds him.

More information about a movie: www.cambodianroom.net

"The Cambodian Room. Situations with Antoine D'Agata"
Directors: Tommaso Lusena de Saramiento i Giuseppe Schillaci
Production: France, Italy, 2009, 52 min.
Date of projection: 20^th August, 9:30 p.m.

Galeria Camelot, address: ul. św. Tomasza 17, Krakow

ORGANISERS:

Imago Mundi Foundation, Planete Polska, Camelot Gallery, Visavis.pl., Dom Norymberski

MEDIA PATRON: Fotopolis.pl

The screening was organized thanks to PLANETE.