Polish artist Agata di Masternak channels her crippling illness into creativity as a way of understanding how other people have coped with their own physical traumas. Małgorzata Kozera’s intriguing film Faces of Agata astutely examines di Masternak’s masterful balancing of art and pain, with the artist herself an engaging narrator of her own challenging life story.
When she was just 16, Agata heard that, most likely, she would bleed to death within two years, after being diagnosed with a rare medical condition named hemangioma. On that day she was born again, but the subsequent struggle has been considerable. After 20 years and more than 30 facial surgeries, she lives in London and works as an artist who has turned her life with her potentially lethal disease into high art.
The film opens with footage of Agata working on a large canvas before a swift cut to a close-up of her face with plasters over her nose and forehead. She heads to Poland for yet another operation and afterwards comments: ”Let’s hope it’s the last one – if it’s not I’ll buy myself a rifle.”
According to Agata “love and hope” are the things that keep her going, and for a new art project she talks with older people who have gone through considerable pain and distress, with one commenting how it added ‘some special character’ to their life. Agata’s new art series is called ID Identity Series 2016-2020, of which she comments on some of her subjects: “The common denominator is not so much the level of pain, because it can’t be defined, but the extremes that they went through. And what they did with it, that they have become these very life-affirming…dinosaurs.”
When Agata’s face becomes even more deformed with recurring angiomas (growths made of blood vessels or lymphatic vessels) the doctors fear that they might lose her once and for all, but after yet another operation she is hopeful that she might get her life back.
Alongside footage of scans of her head she talks frankly about her feelings about the illness. “It wasn’t easy…I gave up many times first during domestic beatings and later during the endless bleeding,” she says. “Mostly already walking on all fours like a marionette without a master. I realised that surrender brings hope because there’s nothing left to do but to look forward with clarity.”
She begins to create more and more artworks that reflect what she has experienced over the years. Utilising and developing computer images of her head and scans of blood cells she crafts a series of evocative images that also help her deal with what she has been through.
Her disease and the pain it causes continue to accompany her, but more and more promising treatment options are being developed. Yet she discovers a greater optimism for the future that derives from her creativity.
Małgorzata Kozera’s crafts an illuminating and gently inspirational debut film that revolves around the importance and power of art as a way of dealing with pain and trauma. Blending striking artistic images with footage of her operations and film of her art work in her studio, the film succeeds in exemplifying redemptive and cathartic power of creativity.
Poland, 2023, 72mins
Dir/scr: Małgorzata Kozera
Production: Plesnar & Krauss FILMS Sp. z o.o.
Producer: Maria Krauss
Cinematography: Marta Stysiak
Editor: Anna Koc-Wittels
Music: Jan Duszyński
With: Agata di Masternak
