Silver Eye

Between Flesh and Firmament: Rainbow Serpent Image-Making and Cosmology is an activation of FIERCE: Pittsburgh, an exhibition of 13 portraits by British photographer Ajamu X that celebrates individuals shaping the city’s contemporary Black queer culture and situates them within an evolving global archive.

This event features a screening of Between Us, The Gaze, a documentary offering an intimate entry point into Ajamu X’s practice, followed by a conversation with artists and project participants Marques Redd, Mikael Owunna, and Devan Shimoyama.

Working across photography, painting, and text, these artists engage the body as a site of pleasure and divine becoming. Redd will present an excerpt from the forthcoming Rainbow Serpent Cosmology Gate 0: A Black Queer Theory of Number and Mythogenesis; Owunna will discuss the collaborative photograph X (Nu / Apuat / Geb); and Shimoyama will reflect on his paintings Nu and Geb. Together, Between Flesh and Firmament asks how image-making might become more expansive through activating the body as a godform and positioning art as a mode of world-building.

Schedule
6pm | Doors open
6.15pm | Welcome
6.20—6.50pm | Film screening
6.50—7.30pm | Artists' presentations
7.30pm | Q&A and Community Reflection
8.00pm | Event closes

Image credit: Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd (Rainbow Serpent), X (Nu Apuat Geb), 2025

Participating Artists

1. Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker, engineer. He is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Rainbow Serpent, an art | tech | spirituality organization. His artistic work spans from creative media, including photography, installation, video art, performance art, sculpture, and architectural light design, to new technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), NFTs, and blockchain. Exploring the intersections of technology, art, and African cosmologies, his work seeks to elucidate an emancipatory vision of possibility that revives traditional African knowledge systems and pushes people beyond all boundaries, restrictions, and frontiers.

2. Marques Redd is a traditional African cosmologist, independent scholar, multimedia artist, and Co-Founder of Rainbow Serpent, a Black LGBTQ art | tech | spirituality organization. The foundation of his work is the reclamation, modernization, and extension of indigenous African knowledge systems, particularly from ancient Egyptian and West African (Yoruba, Dogon, Dagara, and Igbo) contexts, and he seeks every medium he can – film, sculpture, academic scholarship, music, spiritual retreats, performance, and public installation – to bring the multidimensional depths of African cosmologies to the 21st century world.

3. Devan Shimoyama is a visual artist who works primarily in painting and self-portraiture, with works inspired as much by classical mythology as by the culture of his youth. Through his depictions of the queer black male form, Shimoyama investigates the politics of queer culture while navigating his own personal narratives. Using a variety of materials and methods, he showcases the relationship between celebration and silence in queer culture and sexuality.