Who has come here?

The Pond House is an ongoing exploration of memory, identity, and family history. Through analog photography, Tūna documents stories passed down by her mother, aunts, and grandmothers, tracing the connections between seven generations of women in her family. From tales of ancestor healers and witches to connections with religion, Soviet power, and everyday hardship, the house stands as a silent witness in the Latvian countryside of Latgale, abandoned yet still rich with left memorabilia. In the absence of photographic records from those who lived there, Agate and her sister return to the house, wearing their grandmother’s left clothing, attempting to reconstruct the past and uncover the layered connections between memory, myth, and trauma.

The exhibition title merges words “voltage” and “entity,” reflecting quartz’s dual role: a spiritual amplifier and a technological powerhouse. Spirits were once viewed as ethereal beings linked to places or emotions, manifesting through strange phenomena. Today, the concept of ghosts has evolved from restless souls into energy-based entities that resonate with the language of technology - electromagnetic waves, data streams, electronic voice phenomena (EVP), artificial intelligence algorithms and other contemporary media. The quartz crystal becomes a symbolic bridge to such a transformation. From meditation to microchips, quartz continues to shape how we connect, whether through cosmic energy or Wi-Fi signals. During World War II, women worked in quartz factories, cutting and tuning crystals for communication devices, shaping tools that would carry voices across battlefields. Today, these same stones, polished for healing or placed on altars, embody a strange duality: sacred and scientific, personal and political. For Agate Tūna, process is essential, a curious dialogue with materiality and observations of its changes - perhaps this is why she has chosen analogue photography as her main means of expression. Using mirrors, glass, copper wire and scanning, Agate subjects her primary material (raw film) to various multimedia manipulations and interprets the photographic image into plexiglass objects and chemigrams. In addition, spatial extensions of photography enter the gallery as an autonomous affirmation. Furniture, wallpaper, electricity and corporeal symbols captured in pictures of the body are analogous entities that reflect and challenge the digital. At the same time, it is a play with the home as a conceptual place of domesticity and creation, an allegorical electromagnetic field that affects the human (artist’s) body, mind and spirit in everyday life.

Agate Tūna’s artwork, Techno-Spectre, challenges the familiar landscape of photography, immersing viewers in a fascinating cosmos where historical interpretations of capturing the unseen intertwine with the connection between photography, spirituality, and technology. The artwork, Techno-Spectre, metaphorically refers to the digital footprints left in the virtual world. These traces range from insignificant, like saved website data, to more visible, like social media posts, which can continue to haunt our online personas long after they’re created. Our digital presence, from archived emails to online interactions, spreads across the web's vast electrical spectrum, creating a substantial ghostly presence. The ghost, a recurring motif in the author’s artistic activity, embodies the continuous practice of capturing and depicting the elusive in photography. Central to the artwork is the use of chemigrams, created on photosensitive paper with a photo fixer and developer. Merging photography with drawing, she manipulates photosensitive paper both chemically and physically, scratching, folding, painting, and making marks to introduce another dimension of expression. Later, the images are printed on aluminium (dibond), giving the material a new layer of materiality. By bending the surface of the aluminium (dibond), the image, initially constrained within a two-dimensional frame, begins to capture a three-dimensional world. This experimental photographic technique, akin to a carefully executed magic trick, captures images without a camera. In this process, the power of photography is found not only in the final product but in the intricate and multifaceted creation process itself.