Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s first site-specific solo exhibition in Italy, Aerolectics, opens with a poem of the same name on a monumental white wall flanked by a dense soundscape that fills the entire space. Concerned with colonial subjectivities of the African diaspora in the Germanophone region of South Tyrol, the exhibition is constructed around the forgotten stories of three African girls named Asue, Gambra, and Shiama–all presumably inaccurate renderings of their original Arabic names–and the violence of Christian missionary work, which is revealed through text, sculpture, video, performance, and photography.

Rooted in the decade-long research of German historian Ute Kueppers-Braun, Kazeem-Kamiński’s research and practice draws deeply from African diasporic theorists, filmmakers, and artists, as well as Kongo spiritual traditions and Yoruba philosophies. Inspired by Kamau Brathwaite’s “tidaletics” and Édouard Glissant’s emphasis on the landscape, the artist mobilizes the four natural elements–rock (earth), water, fire, and air—to unsettle fixed narratives and structural amnesia.

In Vermessung. Von der Landschaft aus [lit: Surveying. From the landscape], a series of 19th- and 20th-century maps installed on the floor and held down by stones collected locally, Kazeem-Kamiński renders visible the forced migration of thousands of African children to Italy. Arranged in clusters, black-headed sewing pins mark specific locations while evoking a multitude. Yet, their diaphanous color and size make them nearly invisible from above, challenging viewers to come to terms with these histories of displacement and erasure in a semi-comfortable squat.

Purchased in Egypt by the Italian priest Niccolò Olivieri, the three children first spent some time in Innsbruck–where their arrival made local news–before being brought to the Ursuline convent in Bruneck, on January 11, 1855. While Gambra and Schiama appeared to adapt, Asue fiercely resisted, described in the nuns’ diary as “a storm, one that could only be subdued through physical force.” This account is invoked in the video Rub, Rock, Earth. Throat Clearing (2025) where the aesthetic of two wrestlers in a staged struggle channel Asue’s defiant spirit. Through a voiceover, the artist guides viewers across the Alps, highlighting the Insubric line (a geological fault where African and European plates meet) as a site of historical collision and unresolved stories.

Elsewhere, two works gesture toward the entanglement of  salvation, purity, and race within Christianity’s missionary history. In the water gallery is Nursery Rhymes. (Holy) Water (2025), a single channel video projected onto a flowy white textile. Three female performers–transitioning from girlhood to adulthood–undergo baptism and renaming in a photographic studio, chanting a nursery rhyme. As their chant morphs rhythmically into questions–What sins, we ask, what did we do?–the piece destabilizes Christian notions of purity and freedom, highlighting thinly-veiled mechanisms of obscurity and erasure. Drawing on Julie Dash’s 1991 film Daughters of the Dust and Carrie Mae Weems’ photographic work, the artist appears in the video as a photographer, reversing the Western ethnographic gaze to document and visually depict the (dis)embodied Black bodies of Asue, Gambra and Shiama. This gesture functions as an exercise of speculative witnessing and reclamation: The camera becomes both altar and an archive—reframed through a different lens—allowing the artist and viewer to reimagine memory, ancestry, and identity.

Nearby, Prototype Nkisi / Repurposed Savings Box (2025), displayed in the fire room, subverts a colonial-era savings box once used to fund missionary projects. These boxes, which typically depicted kneeling African figures nodding in gratitude when coins were inserted, reinforced Western narratives of racial superiority and benevolence. In her version, the artist disables the nodding mechanism and places a standing Nkisi figure inside an opaque case, urging viewers to confront their expectations and the object’s violent past.

Untitled (Lash, Linger, Load / Nkisi), on the same floor reimagines traditional wooden Kongo Nkisi sculptures that she recasts in ceramic in collaboration with artist Masimba Hwati. In the Kongo tradition, Nkisi stattuetes are inhabited by spirits and activated by inserting nails into their bodies, with every nail marking an oath or a promise. Placed on a mirror, they reference healing, protection, and justice, each nail echoing the thousands of children displaced from their homelands, mirroring the fragmented narratives explored in Vermessung. Von der Landschaft aus.

The uppermost floor, associated with the element of air, marks a culmination of personal and collective transformation. In the video piece Ọya. Fire, Kazeem-Kamiński weaves her dance performance into dialogue with Asue’s rage and resistance, invoking Ọya, the Yoruba-Orisha goddess of storms, rage, and transformation. The piece reflects on how expressions of anger, particularly those of Black women and othered bodies such as migrants, have historically been suppressed or misunderstood. Ọya becomes a space for reclaiming these silenced emotions, revealing their power as agents of liberation.

In Collocation No. 1 / Bruneck, the artist opens up her artistic process, crafting an environment that offers a window into her mood boards, foundational texts, and a constellation of personal references tracing the evolution of her practice. This space also connects the natural elements of air and earth through a simbolic practice that gives voice to absence: the handwritten names of 1200 children tied to specific places in Italy hung on the walls, their presence lingering in archival fragments. In this act of remembrance, Kazeem-Kamiński  renders their stories visible again.

Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is a writer, artist, and scholar. Rooted in Black feminist theory, she has developed a research-based and process-oriented investigative practice that often deals with archives, specifically with the voids in public archives and collections. Interlacing the documentary with the fictional, her works manifest themselves through a variety of media and dissect the present of an everlasting colonial past: a past without closure.

‘Aerolectics’ is the second exhibition project of the three-year program ‘The Invention of Europe’. A tricontinental narrative (2024-2027), curated by Lucrezia Cippitelli and Simone Frangi, and reflects on the monolithic idea of Europe and its constructed narratives.

‘Aerolectics‘ is on view at Kunst Meran until 9 June 2025.