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Invocations is a film piece created by Kenyan artist Jim Chuchu.
Acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Invocations is a two-part video exploring black bodies through themes of constraint and liberation, severance and release.
In the first movement, a body spins and fragments against a white sky while words appear and dissolve: duty against autonomy, separation against belonging. Language becomes incantation, cutting through space and time, as the body resists its weight through ritual and repetition.
In the second movement, multiple figures exhale columns of dark smoke—secrets and silences released. The breath becomes both exorcism and celebration, marking a passage from concealment to visibility. Invocations speaks to queer experience while also reflecting universal questions of identity, tradition and belonging. It explores the tensions between violence and beauty, inheritance and self-determination, and the identities we can neither fully reject nor completely surrender
The film will be screened as a large scale projection onto The Masonic Hall building.
