Armelle holds a BFA from École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges and a MFA from École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design de Nancy. Her work has been exhibited in events and places such as Mucem, Marseille (FR), Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris (FR), equivalentbehaviour, London (UK), SÍM, Reykjavík, (IS), Biennale Photo de Mulhouse (FR), Hangar Y, Meudon (FR), Médiathèque Jean Jaurès, Nevers (FR), la Villette, Paris (FR), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy (FR), CAC - la synagogue de Delme's Gue(ho)st House (FR) and the Saint Pancras Gallery (UK). She’s laureate of residency programs such as Lumen : Atina residency (Italy - 2018), Hangar Y (France - 2022), SÍM (Iceland - 2024) and Villa Albertine (United-States - 2026).
Statement
Armelle Tulunda (b. 1994) is a visual artist and educator whose work interrogates the ways science informs in the West our relationship to Earth and the cosmos while occulting others ways of relating to them. By collecting images from scientific books, digging into space agencies’ archives around the planet or looking for pre-colonial Congolese cosmogonies, those raw materials enables her to deconstruct and reconstruct the models that have been shaping her understanding of her place on Earth : science & Congolese spiritual beliefs.
Her practice mirrors her own relationship with those two and her way of navigating the relationship between them. Her works are then rooted in paradoxical situations : being dependent on light or darkness, using images that are seen as technological prowess by the western eye while using ancestral gestures that have been disappearing for the empowering of the west, playing with the fine line between what is presented as universal ways of relating with territories and her personal experiences or memories. Her current research focuses on traces of ancestral Congolese cosmogoniess scattered accross Africa, Europe and America as a result of colonization.