13 April – 11 May |Opening April 12 19:00 pavlov’s dog Gallery, Bergstrasse 19, Berlin (Germany).
Opening hours, entrance fee: www.pavlovsdog.org

The Riga Photography Biennial award, Seeking the Latest in Photography!, was established in the summer of 2015 with the aim of discovering and highlighting new artists. The award welcomes submissions from Baltic artists and photographers aged 18 to 35 whose works display the power of the image and offer fresh, contemporary perspectives. In 2016, Viktorija Eksta (Latvia) became the first recipient of the award; Diāna Tamane (Latvia) was the recipient in 2018; and, with the award now moved to the festival’s off year, Annija Muižule (Latvia) has been announced as the winner for the Riga Photography Biennial – NEXT 2019. This year, in collaboration with pavlov’s dog gallery in Berlin, the biennial initiates a new tradition of giving award winners the opportunity to organise an exhibition in Germany as well as in Latvia. The first recipient to be shown in Berlin is Diāna Tamane, who has created the solo exhibition Blood Pressure.

Important sources of inspiration and points of reference for Tamane are her personal experiences and her family, whose members often become the main protagonists in her works. Tamane is constantly on the move between Riga, where her family lives, Tartu, where she lives and works, and Belgium, where she has studied and taken part in exhibitions. Her identity is rooted in a complex system that is also manifest in her art projects. Using autobiographic elements – memories, daily routine and personal events – she glues together her experiences and those of her relatives into a single collage that includes found images and texts alongside those she has created herself. This process of narration reveals not only personal stories, but also broader reflections on recent history and contemporary society.

The photo and video series in this exhibition clearly demonstrate Tamane’s interest in working with her own photographic material alongside text, found objects and vernacular photography. She often uses family albums as source material. The video Family Portrait, which Tamane started making in 2013, is filmed in instalments and documents the women in her family (the artist’s great- grandmother, grandmother and mother, along with the artist herself). Every time the artist visits her family in Riga, she strives to record a new video. These videos show the four generations of women sitting tightly in a row on the great-grandmother’s sofa, looking stiffly into the camera. In 2016, when the great-grandmother passed away, the location for the filming changed to the grandmother’s apartment. The three remaining women in the family now pose for the camera. This collection of images was later complemented by the photo series Typology of Touch (2015), showing close-ups of the skin of the four women enlarged to the size of wallpaper, and Tetraptych (2015), which captures fragments of interior wall decoration from each woman’s apartment, discreetly commenting on the changes in aesthetic preferences among generations.

The series of works Blood Pressure (2016) meanwhile represents that part of Tamane’s creative practice that involves working with archival materials and found memorabilia. The exhibition shows twenty-one photographs, all of which – with one exception – are turned away, with their backs towards the viewer, to highlight the measurements of blood pressure that have been jotted down on them with a ballpoint pen. It is a collection of images that the artist found in the family photo album of her great-grandmother after her death. She had a habit of measuring her pulse and blood pressure each day and recording these measurements in a notebook, continuing to do so till the end of her life. If the notebook was missing, she wrote on whatever happened to be at hand. Tamane concludes that this daily ritual had obviously been more important to her great-grandmother than the photographs, i.e., her memories.

Participants: Diāna Tamane (LV/ EE)
Curator: Šelda Puķīte (LV)
Organizer: Riga Photography Biennial in cooperation with pavlov’s dog Gallery
Image: Diāna Tamane. ‘Family Portrait’. 2013 - work in progress. Still from the HD video