Pauline Lomami is presenting her work at Optica from November 1st to December 13th, 2025.

Screensavers presents two works from Po B. K. Lomami’s ongoing Nothing series, Nothing 01 (Small Talk) and Nothing 02 (_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _), part of their larger project Body of Nothing: Silence, Avoidance, Compartmentalization. The works emerge from Lomami’s long-standing engagement with the entangled histories of genocide and colonial mineral extraction in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the core of Lomami’s practice lies the question of representation in the face of these ongoing histories, and the search for alternative modes of engaging with them. What do we see when we look at these histories? Nothing. Yet for Lomami, “nothing” is not emptiness but what emerges where archives fail—in the unrecorded, the unnamed, and the uncounted. In what official archives register as blank or missing, Lomami locates an affective presence charged with traces of life, endurance, and refusal. “Nothing,” far from a recurring motif or overarching theme, thus becomes a defiant method: a way of attending to, staying with, and witnessing history through opacity.

Text by Somayeh Rashvand.

Public conversations at OPTICA
In collaboration with the Dark Opacities Lab
Saturday November 29th, 2025
3 to 4 pm – Po B. K. Lomami and Somayeh Rashvand
4:30 to 5:30 pm – Po B. K. Lomami and RÉSEAU MAYELE