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The

Artist

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Photographer

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Visual Artist

Agate Tūna

Nominated in
2024
By
ISSP
Lives and Works in
Riga
Agate Tūna is a multidisciplinary artist from Riga, Latvia, working across photography, photographic installations, experimental video and sound art.  Her practice explores the relationship between spirituality and technology from a woman’s perspective. Taking a research-driven, web-like approach, she traces connections between her family's spiritualist heritage, hauntology, quartz crystals, and techno-specters while examining how historical narratives, personal experiences, and technological advancements shape our perception of the unseen. Photography, as a "haunted medium," plays a central role in her work, preserving traces of the past while shaping imagined futures. Through analogue and experimental techniques such as chemigrams, she investigates the materiality of the photographic image. From self-portraits to staged compositions, her process is deeply hands-on, involving set construction, object-making, and direct engagement with physical materials.
Projects
2024

Techno-Spectre

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.
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Agate Tūna
was nominated by
ISSP
in
2024
Show all projects
Each year every member of the FUTURES European Photography Platform nominates a set of artists and projects to become part of the FUTURES network.

The materiality of the medium and its relation to the digital realm are themes present in work by Agate Tūna, Gedvile Tamosinaite and Ruudu Ulas. Another trajectory – artistic explorations as an inner resilience towards forces of power and war – are the main focus in the documentary photo series of both Klaus Leo Richter and Katya Lesiv. The social, economical and ecological aspects of today's reality place artists in a challenging position and the projects we have selected this year mirror these concerns and reflections, mining both the rise of digital realities and the context of war against which many of their lives unfold. We believe these five artists will contribute positively to the FUTURES artistic community with the diversity of their approaches, demonstrating the role of the artist in a changing and challenging world.

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