Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński on Black Feminism, Archives, and Disrupting the White Gaze

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, an interdisciplinary artist, recently received the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography from the City of Graz in late 2021. Her first solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien featured works from 2015 to 2021, including video installations like Fleshbacks (2021) and Unearthing. In Conversation (2017). Kazeem-Kamiński uses archival photographs, slide shows, artist books, and video to critique colonial representations and the white gaze on Black bodies. Her practice engages with Black feminism, post-colonial theory, and museology, often reimagining archives as spaces for encounter. She draws inspiration from writers like bell hooks, Audrey Lorde, May Ayim, Christina Sharpe, and Tina Campt, as well as artists such as Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Carrie Mae Weems. In works like You are awaited, but never as equals (2021), she analyzes historical photographs of West African performers exhibited in Vienna in 1896-97, highlighting the spectators' racialized gaze. Her artist book Ashantee (2021) edits Peter Altenberg's 1897 text, while The Letter (2019) explores haunting through a speculative film about Yaarborley Domeï's open letter. Kazeem-Kamiński's work aims to disrupt normalized structures of whiteness and create dialogue around unfinished colonial pasts.