Naomi Lulendo (b. 1994) is a French-Guadeloupean-Congolese interdisciplinary artist. Her work takes shape in puzzle, painting, photography, installation and performance, and borrows from the aesthetics of manufactured objects, the series or the fragment. She holds a DNSEP from the Beaux-Arts de Paris (2018) and is currently completing a PhD in Art studies at ENSBA Lyon (2025).

Her artistic approach involves the articulation of different forms of expression and representation, such as architecture, design, the body, mysticism and esotericism. Words, which play a central role in her work process, function as materials for thought, enabling her to employ strategies such as détournement, play, hidden meanings and the fabrication of identity. The images and symbols she inventories from various geographical and/or historical spaces function as tools for exploring the link to a given territory, whether continental, insular, real or fantasized.

Often drawing parallels between the body as a surface and geographical space as intimate cultural and social spaces, Naomi Lulendo questions the relationships between what we ingest and digest, what passes through us, absorbs us or trans-ports us. Each subject she tackles is the subject of complex reflections that attempt to confront scales and points of view, heritages and mythologies, in syncretic forms where everything responds and corresponds.

She defines herself not as an artist-researcher, but as an artist-(ra)storyteller, whose cross-disciplinarity and grounding in science and knowledge deeply nourish her artistic practice, made up of shifts in language, meaning and displacement. Naomi Lulendo claims a position situated in her Caribbean, European and African origins.

Her latest research, based on plant life and its transformations, aims to re-examine the restorative power of alternative narratives, exploring the links between the exploited body, colonized nature and their shared histories of displacement in a trans-continental and global context where notions of foreign bodies and alienation are thought of as states of being whose modalities of existence are in perpetual redefinition.

Interested in cosmologies, Naomi Lulendo draws on the languages, narratives 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 imagined a series of totemic sculptures in metal, ceramic, concrete or basketwork that evoke the figure of the "Potomitan", which means "central pole" in Creole, in reference to the decorated wooden pole at the center of the voodoo temple, intermediary between the material and spiritual worlds. The visual dialogue between language, body and architecture is metamorphosed into a syncretic whole, where detour and linguistic games blur the usual meaning of the signifier-signified. The Potomitan is no longer merely an architectural element of the voodoo cult; it is a corporeal entity, a personification, a presence. Whether column or body, the Potomitan, as architecture and personification, also represents for the artist a tribute to the Mother figure.

In her puzzle series, Naomi Lulendo often diverts a piece from the game, inviting us to question the absence, the wound created in the surface. Her series are often composed of images from fashion magazines, or of her own distorted self-portraits on fabrics in a variety of patterns - as in the "Faires vos Je" series, which the artist continues to develop. 

In her post-graduate studies, Lulendo narrowed her observations to focus on cotonnades. Taking as her starting point the circulation of Indian women between Asia, Europe and the Caribbean from the 17th century onwards, she develops an investigation of imperial history through the history of goods and their impact on the history of techniques, botany, industrial architecture and style.