Belinda KAZEEM-KAMIŃSKI
Schebestas Schatten [Schebesta’s Shadow], 2017/2021

3 digital C-prints on paper; 10 x 15 cm each
© Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
Photo: József ROSTA © Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art

With her background as a researcher, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński has developed a unique artistic practice that is both research-based and process-oriented. The performative character of her work derives from the nature of research as a process and the viewers’ encounter with the work when they inevitably need to take a standpoint in relation to what the artist presents. Unearthing. In converstation enters into a dialogue with a variety of actors and participants from the past, the present, and the future, creating an intertwining exchange among them with the mediation of the artist. The main role of the conversation, though, is to reveal and expose those disruptions, disparities, and displacements that define the colonial condition. The paradoxical character of unearthing lies in the fact that on the one hand the colonial agents (photographers, ethnographers, missionaries, etc.) are always in the way, hindering the process of revealing history, yet, on the other hand, without the photographs the artist uses, there would be no visual information on the colonial system itself. In order to allow the viewers to focus on KazeemKamiński’s performative intervention, the video employs an austere visuality as a strategy to avoid unnecessary and unwanted associations. The artist mentions the telling example of her use of blue, yellow, and red shapes that are the constituting colours of the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo, yet members of the art scene took them as instances and the influence of Pop Art, minimalism, or conceptual art. In an act of epistemic disobedience (Walter D. Mignolo) these shapes allow the artist to reframe the colonial past, enabling her to retell a visual story with an oppositional gaze.

TIMÁR Katalin