Pauline B. Lomami
Pauline B. Lomami (she/they, also known as Po B. K. Lomami) is an indisciplinary interventionist, a Belgian Congodescendant (DRC) based in Montréal-Tiohtià:ke-Mooniyang since fall 2017.
She co-founded Harambec – Reviving the Black Women Collective with Marlihan Lopez and Jade Almeida in 2023, an organization that aims to defend the rights of Black women and non-binary Black people in the tradition of Black radical feminism. Harambec organizes events and workshops, works with archives and transmission, and offers services to the Black communities of Montreal such as Freedom School. Harambec also collaborates with the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University for the Esmeralda Thornhill Black Feminist Speaker Series to acknowledge and celebrate Black feminist research, scholarship, and activism, consequently creating a bridge between academia and communities.
Lomami is also a co-founder of DC – Art indisciplinaire, an artist-run center created by and for disabled and D/deaf artists in Montreal in 2022. DC sheds light on how the public funding bodies and art organizations’ expectations and projections can misrepresent and erase disabled and D/death artists. At DC, she works on the project Laisse-moi le temps (Give Me Time), a multi-faceted project by and for the disabled and D/deaf artistic communities at the intersection with other minority identities. She currently addresses the need to take the (crip) time for the specific issues, challenges, accomplishments, and experiences of Black disabled artists of Montreal.
Her inclination to intervention initially emerged from urgency, strategy, and reclamation of space-time and was part of her activist and community work in Europe. Her artistic direction has expanded this practice for over ten years, cultivating intrusion, interference, and introspection. She continues to question individuals, institutions, and herself through affection, force, absurd, and quotidian. She uses performance art, installation art, photography, video art, sound art, creative writing, and technologies as critical tools to intervene through.
She is an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) candidate in Studio Arts – Intermedia (Video, Performance, and Electronic Arts) at Concordia University and received SSHRC and FRQSC scholarships. She also holds a bachelor’s degree (2011) and a master’s degree (2014) in Business Engineering from the University of Namur, Belgium, and a graduate diploma (2022) in Communication Studies from Concordia University. However, she has not developed her interventionist practice in art and activism within an institutional learning context.