ABOUT MIKAEL OWUNNA
Nigerian-Swedish artist and photographer Mikael Chukwuma Owunna (b.1990) is an award-winning queer artist. His work focuses on the hidden soul of communities worldwide. Their identities as uprooted people with modern views are opposite to their traditional behavior.
The series of work through which Mikael has been able to express this visual message is Limit(less), an ongoing project to document the expanding conceptions of African-ness and queerness. Mikael talks about LGBTQ African immigrant and asylum seeker experiences across the West and is a first to have ever done so.
Owunna is born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With a degree in Biomedical Engineering and History (Duke University, ‘12), Mikael is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship (Taiwan – 2012).
His projects: I am Atayal!, Limit(less), and Infinite Essence – have collectively exhibited across Asia, Europe, and North America. He is featured in media ranging from the New York Times, PBS, NPR, Al-Jazeera Plus, BuzzFeed, and Teen Vogue to the official outlet of Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture.
Mikael Owunna was selected for the 2018 New York Times Portfolio Review, Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 200, the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward Awards, and Review Santa Fe for his series Limit(less) and Infinite Essence.
INFINITE ESSENCE
The series Infinite Essence is “… my response to pervasive media images of black people dead and dying” as he states on his website. “Being gunned down by police officers, drowning and washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving and suffering in award-winning photography. The trope of the black body as a site of death is everywhere”.
For this body of work, Mikael decides to hand-paint the model’s body with fluorescent paint. Thanks to his engineering background he augmented a standard flash with an ultraviolet bandpass filter, to only pass ultraviolet light. “Using this method, in total darkness, I click down on the shutter – “snap” – and for a fraction of a second, their bodies illuminate as the universe. We view the beauty of the soul and our deeper cosmic connections communicated through them.”
The title Infinite Essence comes from a quote by Chinua Achebe Discussing – the traditional Igbo spiritualità (Odinani) and the concept of “chi”. Achebe found more questions than answers.
As for her, also Mikael started this series with more questions than answers. But with each click of his camera, he tried to decipher a bit more of the big puzzle concerning the blessing of life in the black body.
To see more of Mikael’s works, go to his website here.
