Currently

FAMILIAR / LĪDZBŪTNE

Agate Tūna

15/01 – 21/02/2026

What remains present when an image is transferred from one body to another?

The exhibition considers the photographic image as a familiar. Not as representation or proof, but as an accompanying form. It exists in the relationships between materials, between people, between presence and memory.

The concept of familiar (familiar spirit) refers to a non-human companion, a being that is permanently attached to a witch or other practitioner of magic. A familiar is a relationship structure based on long-term coexistence. Often this being takes the form of an animal, such as a cat, bird, dog, or toad. The exhibition offers a photographic image in this mode of coexistence, as a presence that follows and changes along with the medium.

The work is based on an analog photographic negative, with film as the original body of the image. The negative is not perceived as an intermediate stage on the way to a “finished” image. Here, photography becomes a traveler. Her journey begins the moment the film is inserted into the camera. Then she encounters light, movement, coincidences, mistakes, and moments of insight. Then it goes through development, drying, scanning, file processing, and printing. On this journey, it passes through many hands, instruments, surfaces, and technologies. At each stage, it receives an imprint. She develops scars, scratches, and grain. She can burn, become saturated, or fade.

The exhibition considers archives not as an organized system, but as an organism. As an environment where images accumulate, layer, and become semi-living. Although all images are analog, their life inevitably intersects with the digital cycle. Analog becomes ghost software. The image continues to exist in the mind, in thoughts and on screens, as a file on a hard drive, as a copy on a USB flash drive, as an attachment in an e-mail, as a backup copy. In this cycle, images disintegrate into digital dust and settle in the collective visual field. Here, the body of the photograph is digitized and becomes a data carrier, a face that contains countless passwords, access codes, and permissions. It becomes searchable, comparable, and recognizable, sometimes even confused. Similarity begins to function as a feature that opens accounts and archives.

The exhibition itself functions as a familiar to these works. It is a temporary skin, put on at a specific time and place. When it is removed, impressions remain. Surfaces, fabrics, material remnants, evidence of coexistence.

– Agate Tūna

Agate Tūna is a multidisciplinary artist from Riga, Latvia, working with analogue photography, experimental video and sound art. Her practice explores the relationship between spirituality and technology from a woman’s perspective, tracing connections between her family’s spiritual heritage, hauntology, quartz crystals and techno-specters. Photography, as a “haunted medium,” is central to her work, combining chemigrams, self-portraits, and staged compositions to create imagined spaces with constructed objects and printed fabrics, making photography itself a tactile experience.

She holds a BA in Painting (2020) and an MA from the interdisciplinary department POST (2023) at the Art Academy of Latvia, and is a graduate of the ISSP School (2022). Recent projects include a solo exhibition at gallery ASNI (Riga), group exhibitions such as reGeneration Z at Musée Photo Elysée (Lausanne), Under the Sun at TUR art space (Riga), in collaboration with art space 1646 (The Hague), and a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris). Tūna is a Futures Talent (2024), a participant of Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2025).