CHAMPAIGNE, AIDS, AND STRAWBERRIES

MONIKA K. ADLER

// Monika is a London-based, Polish photographer and filmmaker known for challenging and provocative photography and experimental films. The series ‘Champagne, AIDS and Strawberries’ is her photographic impression on ‘love melodramas’ and existential crises in the world of Parisian artistic bohemia.

Monika graduated from The European Academy of Photography in Warsaw, Poland and the Wojciech Gerson’s National School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. She is exhibiting and publishing her work internationally. She is currently working on the feature film ‘Sick Bacchus’ and the photography project “The Passion”. “I just want to create and share meaningful work with audience worldwide,” she says about her goals.

The quote she selected is from “Possession” and relates to her series.

“When I’m away from you, I think of you as a monster or a woman possessed, and then I see you again and all this disappears.”

Andrzej Zulawski
(Possession)

What draws you to art?

“I loved art, film and photography since childhood. I expressed myself and established a dialogue with the world via those mediums. One picture is worth 1000 words. This is how I feel and it has become the motto of my life, because the one who does not create does not know the real joy of life.”

What do you like best about this photographic project?

“I like the alluring mood of that photo series. The Blue City Paris and its people: full of passion – searching for love.“

“Champagne, AIDS and Strawberries” is a staged photography series made in Paris among the local artistic bohemia. The title is not to be interpreted literally; it is the result of many conversations, ideas, meetings/parties and feelings evoked during two weeks of photoshoots. The French painter Emmanuel Flipo and the Swedish contemporary dancer and photographer Sofia-Karla Axelsson played the main characters. The shoot took place in Flipo’s art studio in Montreuil, at The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris, Montmartre and the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Monika shot analog pictures on Fuji Film, as a visual story about art & passion in the “City of Love”. “Paris and romance, they go together like champagne and oysters…,’ or strawberries, but this love is fleeting and fake,” Monika says. “Whoever takes it seriously will be deceived. Nobody appreciates the lover he possesses. Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, in his novel Dangerous Liaisons, once said: ‘Fools are here below for our minor pleasures.'”

“I am fascinated with human existence – the moral choices we make, our mentality and psychology, and on the other hand, the extraordinary bestiality, brutality and low levels of awareness,” she adds. “Life has always fascinated me – it’s intensity, a liberation from the everyday reality frameworks in which people impose upon themselves slavery based standards.”

VIVA ARTE VIVA!

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