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.

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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

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When the bodies are illuminated, we will see the unseeable within, the soul, the Igbo spiritual concept of the chi.

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it is on this plane of existence where regardless of our experiences of oppression on the physical plane, black people are infinite.

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