Unfinished Conversations: An Opener

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by Anne Faucheret
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An introduction published in Belinda Kazeem Kaminski's catalogue H(a)untings • Sternberg • 2023

Plunged into a semidarkness that is occasionally halted by the lighting of the works and by the projections that punctuate the space, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s solo exhibition is organized in layers and constellations, playing on effects of depth and density, transparency and opacity, frontality and transversality. The space is structured to accentuate the scopic dimension that characterizes the exhibition medium, with an architecture and dramaturgy that asks for the mobility of gazes and bodies. Bodies are invited to move toward, away from, around, to bend over or stand upright, to look in between, through, or behind the works. Without imposing a path, the display and the works rather call for a constant physical and interpretative back and forth, a permanent negotiation between what is given to be seen and what is hidden from view. The protagonists’ gazes and gestures—including the

artist’s—further intensify this back and forth between what can be interpreted and what escapes capture. The atmosphere of the exhibition, somewhere between a study room, a cinema, and a museum, is conducive to the decoding and the mise-en-abyme of the gaze and the regimes of vision. At the same time, a strong sense of collectiveness emanates from the works and shapes the exhibition as a space for reciprocal care and radical speculation. 

Vision, here, is always embodied, always situated, never neutral, never innocent. In her works, Kazeem-Kamiński decodes the scopic regime, which, especially since the second half of the eighteenth century, has contributed to the formation (of the fiction) of the bourgeois, white, male, European “rational” subject, based on racist objectification and colonial exploitation. To this end, she investigates the places where knowledge is produced and circulated, and where gaze and behavior are formed, such as universities, academies, libraries, and museums. In order to foil the violence contained in archival footage, and to open the archive beyond its normative categorization as a historical trace, Kazeem-Kamiński plays with and alters the indexical status of the documents she works with—and by extension her own artworks—even if they are based on a very specific historical context. In this way, she reformulates the archival “document” (which is anyways always incomplete and decontextualized) as an experience of (her) reception, of collective interpretation, rather than as an indication of official memory. Such an interpretation exceeds the boundaries of the official archive and moves into affective and imaginative terrain: the terrain of “utopian promise”, “between history and myth”. (1)

In her exhibition, Kazeem-Kamiński explores diverse methods to communicate across time and space and to linger in the haunting dimension of coloniality. The works shown, be they photographic series, films, or installations, investigate regimes of looking and decode the racist cultural apparatus underlying the subjugation and exploitation of Black lives. They operate collectively to present the afterlife of slavery as structure—at once incorporating the legacies of traumatic events within bodies and the persistence of the material and symbolic conditions of systemic violence today. Like the islands of an archipelago, Kazeem-Kamiński’s works and the exhibition are assemblages of fragments, full of voids and hiatuses, functioning as communicating vessels, continuously in process, in negotiation, in self-reflection. They seriously embrace their political task to set the conditions and to create spaces—real and imagined—for the processing of the past, the invention of the future, and the disintegration of the present as it is. They are constantly put in relation to each other through recurring elements, objects, or symbols, colors or materials, techniques or shapes, which at the same time refer to the cultures of the African diaspora.

Insisting more on voids than on wholes, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński situates her practice not as a heuristic revelation from the archive, nor as a gap-filling, but, on the contrary, as a practice of almost spiritistic summoning of what it may or may not conceal, leaving the gaps to be transformed into spaces in which to imagine, in which to act. Her works create spaces for encounter, conversation, mobilization, and sometimes confrontation between herself and the viewer, between herself and the people who populate her pieces, her memories, and her imagination: those who have been disappeared and those who are gone—who haunt the archives, who are here, who perform and collaborate with her—and those who are to come. They are polyphonic spaces, in which the artist relentlessly acknowledges that she could not become who she is without all those encounters, and also that the artistic process is and should be, structurally, a collective one.

(1) “The archive, especially the moving image archive, comes to us with a set of Janus-faced possibilities. It says, ‘I existed at one point and it’s possible that I could exist differently’. But in order to find that you need something else, which is not in the archive, which is the philosophy of montage. Montage allows the possibility of reengagement, of the return to the image with renewed purpose, a different ambition”. John Akomfrah, at the Visible Evidence Conference, Toronto, August 2015. In his works, Akomfrah attempts to forge a new cinematic language using archival footage, contradicting its documentary dimension to foster its dimension as a promise.

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Link to the book H(a)untings
https://kunsthallewien.at/en/about/publications/publication-belinda-kazeem-kaminski-hauntings-heim-suchungen
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Link to the exhibition's website
https://kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/ana-hoffner-ex-prvulovic-belinda-kazeem-kaminski
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Link to the artist's website
https://belindakazeem.com/home/
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