Po B. K. Lomami develops work using an autoethnographic and intervention-based research approach. Their practice includes performance/action art, installation, photography, video, sound, writing, data processing, teaching, cultural programming, and technological diversion. Informed by African diasporic transmission as well as crip, mad, and bodymind principles, they aim to variously expose, displace, multiply, or terminate, forms of work and labour: administrative, reproductive, intellectual, emotional, physical, or militant. Their work is to perform and install work itself, and rage, and failure, in malleable time, space, mind, and body. Hungry for transformation, Lomami cultivates the intrusive: interfering, or introspecting, they persistently question individuals, institutions, and themself, alternatively through affectionate, forceful, absurd, or quotidian methods.
Central to Lomami’s practice is an exploration of super-archiving: each project begins with an interventionist performance that generates traces: sometimes of physiological and geophysical data, sometimes medical information and treatment, video and sound recordings, texts, or relational accounts. Rather than producing fixed documentation, Lomami transforms these remnant materials into works that investigate super-performativity, surplus, and absence, evoking in all of them what is no longer present. They amplify nothingness, while questioning the infrastructures that shape the very possibility of life, memory, and relationship.
Po B. K. Lomami is an (un)disciplinary artist-researcher from the Congolese diaspora in Belgium, based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal since 2017. Lomami received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Business Engineering from the University of Namur (Belgium), as well as a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies and an MFA in Studio Arts (Intermedia) from Concordia University. Their interventionist practice has developed largely, however, outside of the context of an educational institution. Their work has been presented in Belgium, Sweden, New York, and Canada, and their texts have been published in French, Québécois, and pan-African publication contexts. They have received support from SSHRC, FRQSC, Concordia University, Desjardins Foundation, SWAAC, CALQ, and CAM. They are currently an artist-in-residence at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the Habiter le MAC program.
