RAR: Diana Tamane x PARADISE AIR (JP)

The first route within the Retreat Art Routes residency program reached as far as Matsudo, Japan, where Diana Tamane (EST) flew earlier this year. In doing so, she closed the aforementioned route, which ran between Japan, Estonia and Poland, giving selected female artists working with the medium of photography a chance not only to develop their artistic projects, but also to rest and recuperate.

On her Instagram account, the artist wrote yesterday: That’s it, fell in love with Kyoto. That was also the plan for her stay in Matsudo: not only art practice, but also traveling around Japan’s urban centers, such as Tokyo, Fukushima, Hiroshima and Kyoto in particular. Diana also realized another dream by enrolling in a workshop on sumi-e, a Japanese monochromatic ink painting technique.

In the last year I have been developing the watercolour and ink series The Sea is You. These watercolours are partly meditations and breath-works where I use the psychosomatic method synchronising the breath with painting. I want to make sense of the world through embodied practice and painting, referring to Eastern philosophies, psychosomatics and ecofeminism. 

Diana Tamane

Diana Tamane (Latvia / Estonia, 1986) was born in Riga, lives and works in Tartu. Her primary medium of expression is photography, but she also uses video, text and drawings in her work. In the artist’s works, family albums, documents and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and recent history.  

In 2020, APE (Art Paper Editions) published her first book, Flower Smuggler, which received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards 2020 and was shortlisted for the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards. 

The Matsudo residency will include an artist talk with Diana Tamane, while independently of the RAR program, the artist will show her Half-love series at Kanzan Gallery in Tokyo. The series tells the story of her half-sister Elina.

The organization hosting the Estonian resident is PARADISE AIR.

Diana Tamane’s residency in Japan was supported by State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia and Cultural Endowment of Estonia. 

Route for female photographers