The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz, which is awarded biennially, will be bestowed on Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (born 1980 in Vienna) in 2021.

The jury founded their decision to honour Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński with this award on the following statement: “The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz 2021, bestowed this year on Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński (born 1980 in Vienna), is honoring an artist whose explorative photographic work is closely tied to the researching and unsettling of colonial history and its legacy. Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński creates photographs, but also collages, films, performances, installations, and writings, which scrutinize how the experiences and narratives of Black individuals are suppressed or marginalized. Her sharp analysis of visual regimes and hegemonic epistemologies is based on research conducted in collections, museums, archives, and libraries. As part of her artistic research, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński interlaces analysis with fiction and documentation with imagination. This results in works of art that are piercing and poetic in equal measure, deliberately open, at times fragile and hypothetical—works that facilitate critical insight into how colonial perspectives and matrices of power live on, while at the same time presenting new imaginaries grounded in the Black Radical Tradition.”

Jury
Natasha Christia, freelance curator and author, Barcelona (ES)
Chiara Figone, publisher, Archive Books, Berlin (DE)
Matthias Michalka, curator at Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna (AT)
Reinhard Braun, publisher Camera Austria International, Graz (AT)

The Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz was established in 1989 and is bestowed every two years on an artist who has published a noteworthy contribution in the magazine Camera Austria International and has made an important contribution to contemporary photography. The prize-money is Euro 15,000.

Read an interview with the artists and C& here.