The protagonist of the three-part photographic series In Search of Red, Black, and Green (2021) looks for something that is out of frame, beyond the viewer’s gaze, concentrating on what lies ahead and is not visible to the audience. The three pictures depict the model in almost the same position, but with different colored backgrounds: red, black, and green. This tripartite color combination could be read as a visual code, echoing the flags of some African nation-states established in the wake of decolonization. The three equal horizontal bands, going from top to bottom, of the same red, black, and green also constitute the tricolor flag variously referred to as the Pan-African flag, the Black Liberation flag, and the African American flag – multiple names for one symbol of the liberation of Black people. The artist uses these three colors as coded and powerful reminders of the liberatory resistance struggles of the African diaspora, and for Black freedom in general, which is still “an unfinished project”, as African American thinker and theorist Saidiya Hartman writes. In that sense, Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński’s artwork underlines the urgent need to hold on to what drove and still drives emancipatory and liberatory Black projects: the insistence on imagining, practicing, thinking, and living toward what it would mean to be truly free.

— Anne Faucheret and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński