Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
12th Liverpool Biennial, UK
10 June – 17 September 2023
Slavery lay at the heart of Liverpool’s wealth and prosperity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Between 1750 and 1807, almost 1.5 million persons were trafficked from the port city across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves, and virtually all the leading inhabitants of the town invested in slavery and profited from it. Today, more than 200 years later, the legacy of the slave trade remains a constant and haunting presence.
Khanyisile Mbongwa, the curator of the 12th Liverpool Biennial, has chosen to make the city's past the focus of this edition. Its title uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, references the Zulu word for spirit, soul, breath, air, wind and the conflation between past and present. The Sacred Return of Lost Things suggests a feeling of melancholy which, Mbongwa explained, should be intepreted as an invitation to reflect on, and reconsider, the past. Ultimately, the biennial was intended to be seen as a contribution to the act of reconstruction.
For her contribution to the biennial, co-produced by Phileas, artist Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński created a new video work accompanied by a soundscape created by Bassano Bonelli. Titled Respire, the video builds on previous works created for the artist’s solo exhibition at Camera in Austria 2022, which explore the precariousness of Black life through the act of breathing. Through her work, Kazeem-Kamiński demonstrates how breathing is not merely an act of existence or escape, but also a process of liberation and community building.
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (born 1980 in Vienna, Austria) is a writer, artist, and scholar. Rooted in Black feminist theory, she has developed a research-based practice as a video artist dealing with archives, and specifically the voids in public archives and collections. Her first major solo exhibition was presented at Kunsthalle Wien in late 2021 – early 2022 and her works have also been screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Diagonale – Festival of Austrian Film, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. In 2022, she was awarded the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography.
This is Kazeem-Kamiński's first collaboration with Phileas. Khanyisile Mbongwa was invited to Vienna in May 2022 as part of our Visitor Programme.
