Guest Room:
Renée Mussai & Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński

Guest Room aims to spark collaboration. Curator, writer & scholar Renée Mussai, who pursues a special interest in Black feminist and queer visual arts practices, has chosen to collaborate with Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński, a writer, artist & artistic researcher engaging in a process-oriented practice that deals with the condition of Black life in the African diaspora. Together, they have developed the following framework for your submissions: "Response-ability — Touch/Change — Otherwise".

"Taking our cues from Toni Morrison’s potent expression of ‘response-ability’ and Octavia E. Butler’s generative ideas of transformation, we invite artists to consider notions of change — chemical, social, emotional, personal, political, economic, sexual, cultural, physical, and otherwise.

How might photographic visions convey different states of being and becoming? How might we activate the medium’s potential to embrace and shape change? What do images forged from the trans/formative powers of change look like? Whose touch do they desire/require? What temperature is their pictorial climate? How might we activate our art-and-change-making capacities responsibly to cultivate and practice freedom(s), and see — look — think — live — act differently? What can photography offer in moments of precarity — a visual blanket, shield, or embrace? What might a photographic shelter look like? In times of global turmoil that require critical action on many fronts, with human rights violations abound, what kinds of images — or image bodies — activate change, internal or external, collective and individual? How might photography offer visual paths and possibilities to imag(in)ing otherwise?"