Jim Chuchu
- Mark Auslander
- Mar 21
- 2 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Invocation: The Severance of Ties (2015) and Invocation: Release (2015)
Video works
Close Looking: Queer African Art and Family
Visual description:
These two linked video works follow a young man moving through states of separation and release.
In Invocation: The Severance of Ties, a silhouetted male figure dances in darkness, his body swirling in rhythmic motion. A disembodied voice declares: “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” Fragments of text—suggesting an anguished exchange between parent and child—flash across the screen, evoking conflict, duty, and rejection.
In Invocation: Release, the same figure appears in profile. Waves of smoke pour from his mouth, as if expelling something internal. He confronts mirrored versions of himself and, in a final gesture, embraces one of them.
Context:
These works explore family in queer African art through themes of rupture, release, and reimagined belonging. They emerged following the release of Jim Chuchu’s 2014 film Stories of Our Lives, which brought him public attention as a queer artist in Kenya.
In the wake of that visibility, members of the artist’s family expressed concern that his work dishonored ancestral memory. The Invocation videos can be understood as a response to this moment—transforming personal experience into a staged, symbolic process. Across the two works, the artist revisits the pain of familial rejection while imagining a form of release from it.
Interpretation:
The videos unfold as a kind of ritual. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as moving through three stages: separation, transformation, and return. Chuchu’s work lingers in this middle space—the threshold in which identity is unsettled and remade.
Drawing on traditions of spirit possession across Africa—where individuals may leave one social identity and enter another—the artist reimagines this process in contemporary, digital form. Here, the act of “invocation” becomes a declaration of autonomy.
The repeated phrase “I am not your son. I am not your blood” signals a break from inherited identity. Yet this rupture is not only loss. In Release, the expulsion of smoke suggests the clearing of accumulated pain, while the final embrace hints at a different kind of belonging.
Rather than returning to the same social world, the work gestures toward the possibility of creating new forms of kinship—ones chosen rather than prescribed.
Reflect and Explore
What do you notice first in the movement of the body across the two videos? How does that movement change?
How do sound, text, and image work together? What effect do the flashing words have on your experience of the body?
The artist repeats the phrase “I am not your son. I am not your blood.” How do you interpret this statement?
What role do mirrors and doubling play in Invocation: Release? What might it mean to confront and embrace another version of oneself?
These works explore separation from family. What kinds of new connections or forms of belonging might be suggested?
Learn more
Jim Chuchu, Invocation series (2015)
Stories of Our Lives (2014), The Nest Collective
Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909)
Mark Auslander, “ReMixing Possession: Dreaming Futures Past in the Work of Jim Chuchu,” General Anthropology Bulletin 22 (2015)
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