In Conversation: Mikael Owunna and Jonathan Calm
Thursday, February 18, 2021
6:00 - 7:30 PM PST
On Thursday, February 18th, SF Camerawork was pleased to host a conversation between multi-media artist Mikael Owunna and assistant professor in Art & Art History at Stanford University Jonathan Calm. Responding to images of police killings of Black people, since 2016 Mikael Owunna has worked to articulate an alternative vision of the Black body as the incarnation of the eternal cosmos. Using his engineering background, Owunna built a camera flash that only transmits ultraviolet light, and in each photoshoot he begins by hand painting his sitters’ nude bodies with fluorescent paints that glow under ultraviolet light. Owunna clicks down on the shutter in total darkness, and for a fraction of a second, their Black bodies illuminate as the universe, transfiguring the Black body into transcendent, ethereal vessels.
Titled Infinite Essence, this series explores a transfigured vision of the Black body in relationship with West African spiritual and cosmological systems, particularly Igbo and Dogon. Each image references myths and divine principles from both systems, connecting Black bodies of the present across space and time to our ancestral conceptions of the universe.
Image by Nick Caito
ABOUT MIKAEL OWUNNA
Mikael Owunna is a queer Nigerian-Swedish American multi-media artist and engineer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Exploring the intersections of visual media with engineering, optics, Blackness, and African cosmologies, his work seeks to elucidate an emancipatory vision of possibility that pushes African people beyond all boundaries, restrictions, and frontiers.
Owunna’s work has been exhibited across Asia, Europe, and North America and been collected by institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Equal Justice Initiative, Duke University, and National Taiwan Museum. His work has also been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to CNN, NPR, VICE, and The Guardian. He has lectured at venues including Harvard Law School, World Press Photo (Netherlands), Tate Modern (UK), and TEDx. Owunna’s first published monograph Limitless Africans was released in 2019 by FotoEvidence and was awarded as a finalist for the FotoEvidence Book Award with World Press Photo.
Image courtesy of Jonathan Calm.
ABOUT JONATHAN CALM
Jonathan Calm is a visual artist in the media of photography and video, represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and assistant professor at Stanford University.
His earlier work focuses on the relationship between technologies of representation and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities. His explorationof the socio-cultural, historical and geopolitical imprint of public housing on both sides of the Atlantic puts into perspective, questions and implodes the white utopian legacy of European Modernism to reveal hidden narratives and forgotten residents.
More recently, Calm has pointed his critical eye toward American car culture, exposing how the mythical promise of a boundless journey across the land masks a more sinister reality of African American automobility. His new work draws inspiration from The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide published during the last three decades of the Jim Crow era to direct travelers of color to safe and dignified accommodations. Through a varied array of media - including installation, reenactment and portraiture - he creates complex representations of the black American experience on the road as a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.
Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his work has been reviewed in numerous publications, among which The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, The Washington Post andThe Wall Street Journal.
Calm was the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Headlands Center for the Arts Larry Sultan Photography Award in partnership with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and Pier 24 Photography. The KQED Arts profile Jonathan Calm Revisits ‘Green Book’ Locations in Search of America’s Past and Present was nominated for a 2020 Northern California Area Emmy Award for Best Historic/Cultural-Feature/Segment.
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