WONNERTH DEJACO, Vienna
Philipp Fleischmann, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński
At Art-o-rama 2023, WONNERTH DEJACO presents works of two Vienna-based artists who share a fundamental sense of political urgency, of resistance against discriminatory structures.
It is fundamental to Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s extensive artistic practice to highlight what isn’t told and visible within hegemonic narratives. In her photo series In Search of Red, Black and Green (2021), she “pinpoints […] the personal and collective experience of breaking free – what is it to be fully liberated? She invites us to look back and commemorate what was once celebrated and was a moment of hope, from liberation struggles or movements to Pan-African solidarity.” (Cissy Sossokho)
The performative video Untitled, K.T.C.I. (2022) takes its cues from the radical dramatist and political activist Augusto Boal, the founder of the “Theater of the Oppressed”, originally used in radical left popular education movements. “Those that can or cannot breathe – breathing as an act of resistance, spatial breathing as an activator of radical communion and speculation of Black futures,” Cissy Sissokho writes, “Kill the cop inside as a breathing practice.”
“I have been rebelling against the inscriptions and codes of the film camera, mainly the unit of the single frame,” Philipp Fleischmann declares. “I wanted to get rid of the frame because it is at the core of the representational operations with which I do not agree. … I want to think of the strip’s surface in a more fluid way, to imagine it otherwise, to reconsider the given form, outside of the dominant standardization.”
In his ongoing series of Film Sculptures, Fleischmann has expanded his practice into the realm of queer abstraction: “I want to continue to explore the sensibilities of space and time, concreteness and abstraction, tease, flirt, change, fluidity, interruption, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and openness. Forms of relation and internal discussions. Different states within one entity. … Therefore, abstraction isn’t a shift to avoid representation. Quite the contrary.”
