One can regard the whole of Antoine d'Agata's extreme art as an immense declension of that insight which, for Hölderlin, defines modern tragedy – that is, according to Rainer Schürmann, the pathetic. Prisons, summary executions, brothels, bloodless tenements, a secular mysticism – as in Artaud or Bacon – of convulsion (of salvation through sensation, even that of agony): each of d'Agata's photographs stenographs a boxing-in, a “wandering beneath the unthinkable”, as Hölderlin again puts it, an administration of infinite death, however executive it may be. Modern death is a compartment, impersonal, interchangeable: “the coldest, most trivial death, which matters no more than a mouthful of water or the topping of a cabbage”, as Hölderlin's boyhood friend Hegel would say. Like Artaud, d'Agata seeks the bone of the soul's musics as it lies in the Pandora box. The death-rattle of anonymous death – whether that of a militiaman with a bullet through his head, a Mexican prisoner, or a Cambodian prostitute screaming her distress in orgasm – this is what d'Agata's photographs give us to see. The boxes everywhere in the world groan. Objects are animated by a life that is the death of beings. It is this paradoxical life that d'Agata's extreme art will have always given itself the mission to explore. — Mehdi Belhaj Kacem