X (Nu/Apuat/Geb)
Photography
X (Nu/Apuat/Geb)
Installation Shot: 60"x60" Framed Print at Silver Eye Center for Photography (Sean Carroll / Silver Eye Center for Photography)
Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Geb-Nut Tableau Reference
Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Geb-Nut Tableau Reference
Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Geb-Nut Tableau Reference
X (Nu/Apuat/Geb) is a collaborative cosmological portrait by Rainbow Serpent co-founders Mikael Owunna and Marques Redd, featuring Ajamu X embodying Nu, Apuat, and Geb, three deities from Rainbow Serpent Cosmology. Together, these figures form a triptych of elemental forces: Nu, the primordial Black waters of infinite potential; Apuat, the opener of ways and cosmic navigator; and Geb, the god of the living Earth and tactile embodiment.
Through fluorescent body paint, sacred gesture, and precise photographic composition, the portrait reimagines the ancient Egyptian Geb–Nut tableau as a modern-day Black queer cosmogram. Ajamu’s body becomes both surface and conduit, a living axis where myth and flesh converge. This is portraiture as ritual act: a moment in which history is re-envisioned, power is redistributed, and the body becomes archive, altar, and oracle.
Geb
Apuat
Nu
This work represents an important evolution within Rainbow Serpent’s creative practice. While photography has long been central to their work, and while the sixteen Rainbow Serpent deities were originally developed through live models who informed the sculptural series Myth-Science of the Gatekeepers, X (Nu/Apuat/Geb) marks the first released photographic portrait in which a living artist explicitly embodies the deities within the frame itself. Rather than translating the divine into sculpture or VR film, this image stages mythic presence directly through the photographic medium. The piece was created over two days and three separate photoshoots, each devoted to a distinct divine aspect before being digitally composed into a single cosmological image. This collage methodology expands Rainbow Serpent’s process, layering temporal and spiritual registers into one visual field. The result is composited embodiment, a photographic cosmogram that signals a deepening of Rainbow Serpent’s engagement with myth, ritual staging, and the living body as divine text.
Positioned in conversation with the FIERCE: Pittsburgh series, this image functions as a kind of mythic key that complements Ajamu’s sensual, intimate photographs of Pittsburgh sitters with a cosmological portrait that signals the sacred dimension of queer embodiment. Just as FIERCE builds an archive of Black queer presence, X (Nu/Apuat/Geb) inscribes that presence within an ancestral continuum and metaphysical cosmology. Together, these bodies of work assert that Black queer lives are not only worthy of documentation – they are worthy of deification.
In aligning Ajamu X with Nu, Apuat, and Geb, Rainbow Serpent invites viewers to imagine divinity as something embodied, relational, and ongoing – something that passes between us, through the gaze, and into the image.