Pauline Lomami (Po B. K. Lomami)

Po B. K. Lomami explores how superhumanization is physically and mentally inscribed, the construction of superperformance, and the possibilities of investing it, exposing it, and reclaiming it to create other possible futures as a black disabled person.

Lomami’s projects consist of performing, installing, and displacing work in time, body, thought, and space. Using a performative and interventionist approach, they include installation, photography, video, sound, writing, cultural programming, and technological diversion in their practice. They aim to display, multiply, terminate, or fail several forms of work and labour such as administrative, reproductive, intellectual, emotional, physical, or militant.

Lomami’s work and failure are informed by Afrofuturistic, crip, mad, and bodymind principles. They turn to a variety of materials like mental and physical movements, their medical experience, treatment, and information, and diverted devices or communication technologies. Mimicking or rearranging institutional aspects is a strategy they use to immerse and challenge the audience and put it to work.

Po B. K. Lomami (Pauline Batamu Kasiwa Lomami) is a self-taught indisciplinary artist, art administrator, and artistic and public programmer. They are a Congodescendant (DRC) from Belgium currently based in Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang-Montreal.

Lomami’s practice initially emerged from urgency, strategy, and reclamation of space-time. It was part of their activist and community work with LGBTQI youth and Afrofeminism in Europe. As a disabled black queer person, a Congolese Belgian for whom the intersection of systemic discriminations and related institutional violence were experienced personally, it was a form of action in public space. Their art is a continuation that cultivates intrusion, interference, and introspection. They are continually questioning individuals, institutions, and themselves through affection, force, the absurd, and the quotidian.

Lomami holds a Bachelor’s degree (2011) and a Master’s degree (2014) in Business Engineering from the University of Namur, and a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies from Concordia University (2022).

pobklomami.art