Through a practice ranging from painting to performance and spoken-word, Nicholas Grafia (1990, City of Angeles, Philippines) mines folklore and mythologies that have been historically marginalised by colonial and imperialist powers, and that are still obscured in Western archives, institutions and discourses. In Grafia’s camp performances and dense, painted compositions, these stories intertwine with icons from popular culture and other contemporary references to emphasise the continued racism and othering to which erasure contributes.

Sick Building Syndrome (The Tea) (2022) is part of a new body of work tackling the often dehumanising representation of Black people in American cultural productions, and how these relate to racism and White privilege. Inspired by cinematic forms of storytelling, the painting is horizontally framed by two black bands that recall a screen’s edges and is further structured by the depiction of a three-paned distorted window, through which the main action unravels. Marked by an uncanny atmosphere, the work shows a woman lying in bed while a Black, gender-ambiguous person – inspired by a scene centering Daniel Kaluuya’s (1989) character in Jordan Peele’s (1979) film Get Out (2017) – screams in terror. Here, Grafia reimagines ‘White horror’ or the terror of White characters in American horror films which, according to the American scholar, Russel Meeuf (1981), reflects their fear of any menace to their position of privilege. Influenced by Peele, Grafia subverts the genre to instead highlight the psychological effects of racism on Black people. The spectral or monstrous apparition of the Black figure alludes to how people of colour have been historically dehumanised in cultural depictions. Grafia also draws on Frantz Fanon’s (1925 – 1961) seminal book Peau noire, masques blanches (1952, en.: Black Skin, White Masks, 1967) and its exploration of the impact of performing Whiteness on Black people’s psyches.

Part of the storyboard of Nicholas Grafia’s upcoming film, the painting Collateral Damage (2021) is inspired by various iconic American horror movies such as Children of the Damned (1964) and Children of the Corn (1984). It illustrates, in the artist’s words, the ‘revenge of the doom children’ and employs this trope to tackle the colonial and post-colonial histories of the Philippines. Film references are woven together with archival material, including early 20^th century newspaper clips and scholarly articles, showing Filipino children under American soldiers’ control during the cholera epidemic that followed the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). Set against a dark green background, the composition has a dreary atmosphere that evokes notions of post-colonial trauma, disease, military control as well as violent warfare.