Antoine d’Agata — Anticorps — Le BAL — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 24 → April 14, 2013

Antoine d’Agata comes to LE BAL in early 2013, ten years after his landmark exhibition at Galerie Vu. Ten more years for an oeuvre which ultimately has just twenty years behind it. Ten years of confrontation and ever more radical immersion into the thickness of the world; its gaping wounds and incandescent fringes. Ten years during which his language has slowly become more abstract, darker, more abrupt, without ever compromising in the demands he makes on his work and on himself. Demands that imply living his demons and grasping the violence of a world that both obsesses and inhabits him.

Fannie Escoulen and Bernard Marcadé plunged into tens of thousands of images and texts, grappling with this teeming mass of material, grasping the infinite sediments of elicited situations and fortuitous scenarios to then cut through this bottomless seam. The exhibition at LE BAL testifies to the vastness of Antoine d’Agata’s production, the implications behind it, and the position of a man who instils the extreme experience of his own and others’ existence with a revelatory power. This deliberate, conscious choice to live life on the edge—the ultimate form of resistance—has resulted in images that become one and the same object. The body-object he uses to give a voice to contemporary alienation. The innumerable, the unspeakable, stupor, ecstasy, mutism all betray the relationship between d’Agata’s work and death; the limit he addresses and opposes.

Alongside the exhibition, debates, performances and readings shed light on this dense body of work with its many literary, philosophical and aesthetic references, as do accounts from the people who have met and known Antoine d’Agata. A series of films, curated by Philippe Azoury, a fellow traveller on the road of life, presents cinematographic works that are akin to the photography of Antoine d’Agata.