Cathrin-Pichler-Prize 2018: Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
The Cathrin Pichler Prize, sponsored by the City of Vienna with 2,500 Euros, is awarded to the artist and author Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński for her work The Letter. The opening will be the occasion to present the first publication of the Cathrin Pichler Archive The Curator As..., edited by Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein and Sabine Priglinger, Schlebrügge Verlag 2018.
The work of Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński revolves around memory, trauma and black radical imagination, bringing together black feminist theories with a visual practice. The work The Letter (2018), presented in the course of the Prize Ceremony, moves between video, performance, sound and text. It takes its starting point in the reverberating memories of a group of West Africans in 19th century Vienna. It opens up an analysis of the principle of the "archive" in general and the traces it contains.
In Belinda Kazeem-Kamińskis's new work The Letter (2018), memories of people from the African diaspora who were exhibited at the time are evoked in the present and confrontatively linked to the present through the encounter of various formal and transdisciplinary levels. Her method of narrative approach and approach to the object of research thus creates space for speculation, art-based analysis, projection and artistic research. The video shown at the Cathrin Pichler Prize presentation is intended as a prelude to a longer film project that will follow, in which she will deepen and additively condense her investigations layer by layer in a process.
The jury was composed of: Carola Dertnig, Susanne Neuburger, Andreas Spiegl and Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein.
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, born 1980, is a Vienna-based artist, art researcher and author. As part of her PhD-in-Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she is researching on the performativity of being black in relation to Austrian colonialism. Based on scenes from Austrian history, she is interested in memory that transcends space and time and in the radical imagination of black people. In 2009 she published the book Das Unbehagen im Museum. Postkoloniale Museologien (Turia + Kant) together with Charlotte Martinz-Turek and Nora Sternfeld. In 2016 she published Engaged Pedagogy. Antidiskriminatorisches Lehren und Lernen bei bell hooks (Zaglossus). In 2017/18 followed the German and English edition of Kuratieren als antirassistische Praxis (De Gruyter Angewandte Edition), which she edited together with Natalie Bayer and Nora Sternfeld. Kazeem-Kamińskis works were shown nationally and internationally. In 2016 she was awarded the Theodor Körner Prize for Art. In 2017 she received a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.