FROM THE PAGANS SERIES BY JIM CHUCHU The Nairobi artist calls his 2013-2014 photo series A reconstruction of future-past anonymous African deities, their devotees, and forgotten religious rites. This and other photographs from Pagans are showing at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery.
FROM THE 'PAGANS' SERIES BY JIM CHUCHU The Nairobi artist calls his 2013-2014 photo series "A reconstruction of future-past anonymous African deities, their devotees, and forgotten religious rites." This and other photographs from Pagans are showing at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MARIANE IBRAHIM GALLERY

For an artist like Jim Chuchu, born and living in the city of Nairobi, the 21st century is a peculiar place.

As a cosmopolitan, creative gay man, he's rejected by the mainstream religions that dominate his country, Christianity and Islam. He's interested in discovering spiritual alternatives instead, exploring histories that predate the patriarchal, homophobic colonial religious systems.

But a return to actual tribal histories and images presents two major problems.

Jim Chuchu at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery on May 19, 2015.
Jim Chuchu at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery on May 19, 2015. JG

The first problem is that those tribal histories are as unfamiliar to Chuchu as to the average American, he said. They're not his life, his experience.

"It's not a part of me, yet it's supposed to be a part of me," Chuchu described in a conversation in Seattle this week.

The second problem is that "a return to African values is the banner under which you say homosexuality is not allowed," he explained. "It [also] means a return to treating women... like property."

Chuchu is left without the embrace of the present, or the ability to take comfort in the past. So he remixes a new past in order to point toward a new future. He dreams in pictures.

"I'm interested in artists like Khalil Joseph, and the move to reshape blackness," he said, into "a blackness not afraid to dream, a blackness not afraid to exist in another world... People were mocked for wanting a space station in an African country" as if NASA wasn't a science-fictional idea "on a napkin" at one point, too. "If black people aren't allowed to dream, how can we create something?" Chuchu said.

His 2013-14 photo series, Pagans, now on display at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Seattle, depicts people engaged in what look like sacred, ecstatic rituals. Sparks and flames of light spew from dark-skinned bodies.

"I don't think when we see our skin we see light," Chuchu said. "Light associated with black bodies is still a political project in 2015."

Chuchu was seated in front of a standing-room-only audience at the gallery on Tuesday night. He was joined by his interviewer, Negarra A. Kudumu, the strong-minded scholar who moved to Seattle in 2014. (Let's hope she stays.)

Kudumu asked Chuchu what's missing from contemporary art—what people are still not capable of making and showing; what's missing because it's too risky still.

He described a film he showed in which a black and a white man were making out. They started talking intimately about the way each other smelled—that there was a "black" smell and a "white" smell. After the film, the audience (not in Seattle) told Chuchu they were shocked by this exchange.

"How is it that we are not talking about how alien we are to each other as human beings?" he said to the Seattle crowd. "There are still so many basic things that we don't talk about."

Chuchu had flown in hours earlier from New York, where Seattle dealer Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt had presented his work in the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair. She also organized his Seattle exhibition at the gallery, which is his first gallery solo anywhere.

Ibrahim-Lenhardt first saw Chuchu's work in Senegal last year, when it appeared as part of an event associated with the Dakar Biennale—and was shut down by the authorities for being "detrimental to our morality and our laws" and "propaganda for [same-sex] unions that are against nature."

A 2014 film Chuchu made with the NEST Collective he's part of in Kenya was also outlawed in his own country. It's called Stories of Our Lives (YouTube trailer, Wiki page).

At the Seattle gallery talk, Ibrahim-Lenhardt asked Chuchu to tell the story of the making of Stories of Our Lives. He described how the filmmakers traveled to Kenya and recorded interviews with more than two hundred people about their "deviant" sexuality. The filmmakers then acted out five stories based on those interviews. They didn't list their names in the credits, but when the film made it into the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival, they knew their faces would be identifiable onscreen and Chuchu decided to come out of the closet. It was a great legal and personal risk.

And Chuchu's mother's response—"THIS IS NOT YOUR NAME"—flashes across a video monitor at Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in a short new video featuring Chuchu.

"She said to be careful using my father's name—that I'm spoiling that name for everyone else," he said. "As if my name is a natural resource that I'm supposed to, like, protect and clean once a week... My membership in the tribe was threatened."

That video is called Severance. "Having a family allows you to sever from other things," Chuchu said. He's found a new family in the NEST Collective, he said, among the group of artists who are "misfits in our city," coming from all backgrounds, including a doctor and social worker.

Tuesday's conversation meaningfully explored one man's individual struggle, urban life in Nairobi, and postcolonial hypocrisy. Chuchu described the pressure on Kenya from the U.S. and Europe to "catch up" on LGBTQ rights, without any awareness of the differences within the cultures, or that the colonial powers installed the current form of homophobia in Kenya in the first place.

Events like this are emblematic of Mariane Ibrahim Gallery and why the gallery, which only opened in 2012, is already one of the best art spaces Seattle has. Ibrahim-Lenhardt does most of her actual business outside Seattle—it's "too conservative" here, she explains (and if this sounds surprising to you, please do look again at the city you consider worldly). To do her business and continue to broaden intellectually, she travels constantly to other cities and nations.

But still she returns here to present exhibitions and talks like this one. Thank you, Mariane Ibrahim-Lenhardt.

Here's To Catch a Dream, a 13-minute film by Chuchu that's also about envisioning worlds other than this one's past or present. (It's not playing at the gallery.)