Agata — Bieke Depoorter and Agata, signed second edition, 2022

Agata is a photo book about a young woman using a photographer to find herself — and a photographer using a young woman to question the nature of authorship. The result is not a portrait, but a double exposure of identity, projection, and control. Over three years, Bieke Depoorter and Agata staged a prolonged, unstable collaboration that shifted constantly between complicity and confrontation.

Structured as a chronological sequence of photographs, handwritten letters, marginalia, and staged scenes, the book invites the reader to choose whether to open the sealed pages and reveal the hidden counter-narratives within. The Japanese binding, with its perforated folds, becomes a physical metaphor: what remains closed, what is revealed, and who decides. There is no fixed truth here — only overlapping interpretations, ruptures, and mistrust.

This signed second edition, self-published by Des Palais in 2022 with an additional addendum, is already out of print. In the Darwin archive, Agata sits alongside works by Sophie Calle and Nan Goldin, not as documentation but as durational performance: where image-making is both a method of seeing and a site of conflict.

Technical Sheet
Title: Agata
Artist / Author: Bieke Depoorter
Collaborator: Agata
Date: 2022
Edition: Second edition with addendum, signed by the artist
Technique / Printing Method: Offset, Japanese binding with perforated folds
Medium / Materials: Hardcover
Dimensions (cm): 32 × 24
Language: English
Pages: 424
Publisher / Editor: Des Palais
ISBN: 978-9-46459-027-2
Condition: NEW