MIKAEL
OWUNNA
Mikael Owunna is a Photographer and Engineer, His series, "Infinite Essence (2017-2020), is in response to
the pervasive media images of black
people dead and dying, being gunned down by police, officers, drowning and
washing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, starving, and suffering in award-winning photography.
With this series, Owunna transfigures the bodies of his black models into transcendent ethereal vessels. He
hand-paints their bodies with fluorescent paint and then uses a custom made flash for the ultraviolet light. In the darkness, for a fraction of a second, the model bodies illuminate
as the universe
When the bodies are illuminated, we will see the unseeable within, the soul, the Igbo spiritual concept of the chi.
it is on this plane of existence where regardless of our experiences of oppression on the physical plane, black people are infinite.