Body of Nothing: A Counter-Defence

In Counter-Defence, Pauline Batamu Kasiwa. Lomami (Po B. K. Lomami) proposes to reimagine the thesis defence as a process of positionality-sharing and relation-building rather than a demonstration of mastery. Decentering clarity, justification, and proof, this conversation will question the demand to render all aspects of artistic research transparent for institutional recognition and will include a guided tour of Lomami’s thesis exhibition. The Counter-Defence is an encounter for co-implication rather than evaluation, inviting us all to pay attention to how we participate in the politics of interpretations, the process of meaning-making, and the mechanisms of validation.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:

The Nothing series is an ongoing body of work composed of entangled projects that together disclose a mental and socio-political infrastructure of collapse, taking the shape of the exhibition Body of Nothing: Silence, Avoidance, Compartmentalization. The concept of nothing is deceptively simple, often conceptualized as void, lack, or absence — a negation of being, an empty category that holds meaning only in relation to what it negates. Yet, when Po B. K. Lomami looked at the marks of colonialism, genocide, ecocide, displacement, and madness, nothing is not absence but presence: the charged residue of loss, silence, refusal, and survival. Nothing is daily negotiation. It appears in the silence of archives, in interrupted testimonies, in refusals to perform trauma for outsiders. Nothing is not emptiness but a critical resource: a mode of opacity, an affective surplus, and a necropolitical scar.

Exhibition hours:
October 1 | 5 to 9 p.m.
October 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 | 1 to 6 p.m.
October 8 | 5 to 9 p.m.

Location:
Black Box – EV S3. 855 (basement S3)
Concordia University – EV Building
1515 Saint-Catherine Street West, Montreal

🗓 October  8, 2025
🕒 4-6 PM
📍Milieux Resource Room EV 11.705