Naomi Lulendo (born 1994, France) is a French-Guadeloupean-Congolese artist based in Paris, France. Using photography, ceramics, installation and video, her work explores the concept of 'détournement' of words, meanings and objects. She inventories images and symbols from different geographical spaces - from fashion imagery, kitsch decoration, interiors, architectural motifs to botanical motifs - and questions their relationship to a given territory, imagined or fantasised. In her work, Naomi Lulendo explores the ways in which certain bodies, objects and architectures are perceived, highlighting their capacity to stand in a new relationship to history and the present - in different cultural or geographical contexts, real or imagined. Through alternative representations and semantic diversions, she questions iconographic mythologies and challenges existing representations. In particular, she uses the principle of play in her work to question the notion of mixed identity and the romanticised and capitalised forms of femininity.

In the 'Panorama' series, Naomi Lulendo questions the way interior spaces are perceived and appropriated, playing with visual ambivalence, the notion of transparency and slippage, opacity and reflection, reversing background and surface in a spatial and temporal disorder. Oscillating between a place lived in and a place dreamed of, the vanishing lines of perspective collide with a thicker texture on the surface: floral motifs that cover the canvas gradually fade into the background, amidst palpable geometric architectural elements reminiscent of houses in hot, humid climates such as the artist's native Guadeloupe.

Using the principle of play as a visual strategy to explore constructions of identity, some of her works explore the relationship with the body and memory through intimate objects such as combs, tights and mirrors, all materials that evoke a figure present in her work, the maternal figure.

Her series of jigsaw pieces are made up of images from fashion magazines or distorted self-portraits on differently patterned fabrics. A single piece is always missing from the image, leaving the viewer in doubt and asking us to question the absence.

Interested in cosmologies, particularly voodoo cosmologies, Naomi Lulendo draws on the languages, stories and aesthetics of her Creole and African origins. In the 'Potomitan' series, presented at Selebe Yoon in 2023 and at the Palais de Tokyo in 2024, the artist has devised a series of totemic sculptures in metal, ceramic, concrete or wickerwork that evoke the figure of the 'Potomitan', which means 'central post' in Creole, in reference to the decorated wooden post at the centre of the voodoo temple, the intermediary between the material and spiritual worlds. Whether a column or a body, the Potomitan, as architecture and personification, also represents a tribute to the mother figure for the artist.