We are pleased to announce the recipients of the Kim? Summer Residency 2025: Sui Lam 林淼, Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel, Sebastian Koeck, and Carla Wirsching!
The four international artists and researchers have been invited to spend the summer of 2025 in Riga, developing their creative projects. Each of these practitioners brings a unique perspective on contemporary art, architecture, and visual language, contributing to the exchange of knowledge and dialogue between Latvia and the wider international context.
The aim of the residency is to foster creative collaborations and conversations between the Latvian and international art communities. By providing space for research, dialogue, and shared experimentation, the Kim? Summer Residency—housed in our future new premises at Hanzas iela 22—seeks to cultivate connections that may grow into meaningful, fully realized projects. The residency will offer participants the opportunity to collaborate with local partners and explore Riga’s dynamic art scene.
Sui Lam 林淼 is a Hong Kong multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer. They are currently navigating borders across the Nordics, Baltics, UK, Taiwan, and Japan, seeking a home. Their work spans audiovisual media, photography, printmaking, and multilingual writing. With a deep sensitivity to language, identity, and personal stories, they translate these narratives—alongside their own—into visual experiences and multilingual poetries, that invite reflection and dialogue.
They are looking forward to all the collaborations and encounters in Riga, discovering new and missing pieces through connections during this residency.
Kamil Bouzoubaa-Grivel is a French-Moroccan artist working between France and
Morocco. He studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice explores the tension between digital and manual image-making, translating visual elements from the digital realm into hand-drawn forms that blur the lines between print and gesture, abstraction and illusion.
He has exhibited in numerous group shows at institutions including the Fondation Pernod
Ricard, Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research (Paris), La Panacée – MOCO
(Montpellier), Fiminco Foundation (Romainville), Wallonia-Brussels Center (Paris),
Komplot (Brussels), and the TGCC Foundation (Casablanca). He has participated in international residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Villa Belleville (Paris), the Boghossian Foundation at Villa Empain (Brussels), Jester (Genk, Belgium), and the Montresso Art Foundation (Marrakech). His work has been recognized with several awards, including the Drawing Prize from the Hugot Foundation – Collège de France (2019), the Takesada Matsutani Prize (2020), and the
Mustaqbal Prize (2024).
Sebastian Koeck’s central theme of practice is the search. Identifying ways in which we interact with our surroundings, both tangible and intangible, he creates site-specific installations that embody a sense of enigmatic absence. Utilizing distress as a harbinger of a past that informs the present in an attempt to form a viable future. Through collecting and assembling vernacular material, often by anonymous authors, he plunges into the sticky realm of the anecdotal, history, and chance in order to create a structured atmosphere that rewards curiosity and patience, while simultaneously examining the exhibition as a medium. Taking a stance against the solitude produced by the pervasive premises of the spectacle.
Carla Wirsching is a German architect and researcher who has worked on and written for several issues of the Zurich-based architectural magazine archithese. Currently, she has been working at the Chair of Recent Building Heritage Conservation at TU Munich with publications on the heritage of socialist modernism in post-Soviet countries. At Kim? she will be working together with her friend and colleague Māra Starka to critically reflect on architecture-related publishing in Latvia.
