Agate Tūna
Latvia
Biography
Agate Tūna (born in 1996) is a multidisciplinary artist from Riga, Latvia, working across photography, photographic installations, experimental video, and sound art. Her work explores the intersection between technology and spirituality, using family narratives and shared histories to blur the lines between reality and fiction. Tūna’s photography began with staged self-portraits, exploring themes of identity and change, which continue to shape her practice. The main technique she develops is Chemigram photography, but she has expanded her work into video, exploring the metamorphic qualities of photographic images. Her current focus is on the dual role of crystals, especially quartz, in both spiritual and technological contexts. Tūna holds a degree in Painting and an MA in POST from the Art Academy of Latvia. She has exhibited internationally and was nominated for the Purvītis Prize 2025.
Last Project
Grains of Sand and Screens is a video artwork by Agate Tūna that explores the shape-shifting identity of silicon, an element found in many forms, from sand and quartz to glass, bones, and microchips. Moving between the natural and the technological, the bodily and the digital, silicon serves as a connector between seemingly opposite worlds. Through a combination of scanned chemigrams and AI generated movement, the work draws visual and conceptual parallels between the organic growth of crystal structures and the fluidity of digital media. It invites viewers to reflect on how deeply silicon is embedded in both our physical landscapes and virtual realities. How do materials hold memory? Can a mineral dream, record, or summon? Through a rhythmic interplay of image and motion, Tūna invites us to look into the ghostly traces and energetic pulses that emerge within the infrastructures we so often overlook.
Statement
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. In this sense, Tūna challenges the female aspects of technology and affirms her belonging to the field of spiritual feminist methodology – the replacement of rational and materialistic patriarchal beliefs with emotional and intuitive knowledge. Spiritual feminism focuses on intuition, energy, nature, mysticism and alternative knowledge systems (dreams, rituals, spiritual practices) as sources of collective transformation, and Agate Tūna’s “Voltentity” ideally embodies its essence, declaring the bodily, cosmic and magical as the central perspective. The grammar developed within the exhibition thus unintentionally and cyclically suggests the crystalline and technological concepts used (entity, technology, mother-plate, memory, nest, etc.) as entities in the female gender.
