Baltic Analog Lab invites to an artist talk with our current artists-in-residence Driss Ouaamar (MA) and Sonia Kahn (USA) performing together with local musician Aleksis Luriņš. They will present the “work in progress” films they have been working on during the residency, and their previous works.

Sonia Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily at the intersection of moving image and print. Reimagining and repurposing materials in conversation with forgone technologies, she interrogates the interrelationship between movement, time and materiality. At BAL, Sonia was working on a multi-channel 16mm / Double 8 documentary. As her family fled Riga during the Soviet Occupation in 1975, she is looking into the subculture of filmmaking and experimental works made in Latvia during the Soviet Occupation that pushed beyond the boundaries of the Socialist Realist program, also working with the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents. Using the archive as a starting point, her project explores these films in conversation with our present through a variety of in-camera and chemical techniques. Her project is kindly funded through the Mortimer-Hays travelling fellowship.

The "work in progress" film "Brīvība" will be demonstrated with live sound by Latvian sound artist Aleksis Lūriņš who is know for his projects Ritunsiic, Nesen and Durduns.

Driss Ouaamar is from Ouarzazate, Morocco, and his work explores the buried memories of post-colonial exploitation through multidisciplinary mediums and repurposed archives. Currently, he is reactivating the narratives of Moroccan, Italian, and Polish migrant laborers in 20th-century France through the life of his grandfather, a man stamped “green” under Félix Mora’s labor recruitment system to work in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coal mines. His approach blends cinema, new media art, and installation.
Through 16mm film, “The Diaspora Imprint” engages collective memory, experimenting with archival footage, analog bleaching, manganese mineral powder, and printing techniques. This approach not only enriches the visual language of the project but also provides a legal pathway to reclaim historical materials that would otherwise be inaccessible due to copyright restrictions.

The event will take place in the Baltic Analog Lab 2nd floor residence room, Lienes iela 19a.

Event language: English.
Free admission, drinks for donation.

Baltic Analog Lab Residency is supported by Latvian State Culture Capital Foundation