My students and I in ANTH215 (Gender, Sexuality, Culture) at American University are developing close looking guides to works on display in the exhibition, “Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art.” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.
Here is a guide to two linked videos by the Kenyan multimedia artist Jim Chuchu, Invocation: The Severance of Ties, 2015, and Invocation: Release, 2015
Excerpt of Invocation; The Separation of Ties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSmAbIOo6b8
Excerpt of Invocation: Release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM1_8ugk2no
Notes by Mark Auslander
Description: In Invocation: The Severance of Ties (2015), a swirling young male body in black silhouette dances, to rhythms that in other times would summon an invisible presence into visible flesh. A disembodied male voice pronounces, to a beat that is simultaneously ancient and techno: “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” Letters and a pulsing curser flash across the screen, alluding to duty and love and evil, traces of an anguished email correspondence between parent and son. In Invocation: Release, the same young man’s silhouetted profile moves on and off the screen, as waves upon waves of smoke billow out of his mouth, releasing toxins of self-loathing and despair accumulated over a closeted lifetime. He confronts mirrored images of himself, and at last embraces one of them.
Background: The project emerged out of the artist’s (evidently involuntary) coming out, following the release of his 2014 LGBTQ+ film, Stories of Our Lives, made with the Nest Collective in Nairobi. Chuchu’s family members raised concerns that he was despoiling the memory of a specific ancestor. In this work, the artist reenacts the trauma of receiving words of condemnation from his family members, and his release of the toxicity associated with their disavowal of him.
Interpretive Notes: The two videos can be read as psychedelic rites of techno-possession, as the artist pronounces his own separation from his natal family.
Rites of possession in Africa have long afforded individuals oppressed within the lineage or clan into which they were born the possibility of rebirth into a secret society, made up of those who have learned to live productively with their possessing spirit. In Invocation, Chuchu remixes this ancient template to envision an even more radical separation. A swirling young male body dances, to rhythms that in other times would summon an invisible presence into visible flesh. A disembodied male voice pronounces, to a beat that is simultaneously ancient and techno: “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” Letters and a pulsing curser flash across the screen, alluding to duty and love and evil, traces of an anguished email correspondence between parent and son.
As in ancient rites of possession in Africa, this act of invocation, while arising from pain and unexpected injury, is transformed into a purposeful ritual of strength and empowerment. The artist’s body, swirling like a Sufi devotee seeking oneness with the godhead, pulses with growing energy, growing the multiple arms of a Hindu divinity, emerging out of a chrysalis toward some other form of being. In the other video, Release, the same young man’s silhouetted profile moves on and off the screen, as waves upon waves of smoke billow out of his mouth, releasing toxins of self-loathing and despair accumulated over a closeted lifetime. He confronts mirrored images of himself, and at last embraces one of them. Like the ancient initiate, he loses one family, only to gain another.
Prompts for closer looking:
- Consider the narrative sequence of these film in terms of the tripartite structures of rites de passage first articulated by Arnold van Gennep and further developed by Victor Turner; separation-limiality-reaggregation. How is the artist-subject removed or separated from ordinary life, then suspended in an intermediate state betwixt and belief normal planes of existence, and then reintegrated, as in rituals of initiation, back into ordinary life, at a higher level of psycho-social integration?
- It would be interesting to contrast these works with others in Here, in which an artist dismembers an older (often stigmatized) identity in a quest, at long last, to enter a promised land. It would be especially interest to compare the Chuchu films with Tobi Onabolu, “Dear Black Child,” 2021 (directly adjacent in the gallery). How do these different work envision processes of separation and subsequent connection with queer, accepting counterparts?
3. Consider the relationship between word and image in Invocation: the Severance of Ties. In what ways, perhaps, does the stamping of words from the letter or emails from disapproving family members cut like a knife on the body of the artist-subject? How do the rhythms of the dancing body and the flashing words reinforce the impact of the narrative unfolding in front of us?
- What does the artist accomplish by placing kinetic solid black figures on a white field, in silhouette style? It might be interest to compare this visual strategy with the well-known appropriations of 19th century silhouettes by Kara Walker in her remixing of the imagery of race, gender, and sexuality.
For further reading:
National Museum of African Art. https://www.jimchuchu.com/invocations
Mark Auslander, “ReMixing Possession: Dreaming Futures Past in the Work of Jim Chuchu,” General Anthropology Bulletin 22 (October 2015): 14–15.
Mark Auslander 