The Diaspora as Seen Through Pink Carabaos, Boxers + More in Nicholas Grafia's Comeback Kid.
The exhibit runs until September 10 at Silverlens in Makati City.
(SPOT.ph) How does one define the self and the body within the complexities of understanding notions of nation, culture, and history? Nicholas Grafia tells us in his recent solo exhibition, Comeback Kid., which runs until September 10 at Silverlens in Makati City.
Born in Angeles City and raised in Europe, Grafia examines the designations of identity drawn from personal experiences as he finds himself navigating through situations tied to universal issues. Looking through an entangled web of inherited histories encompassing colonial trauma, xenophobia, and right-wing tendencies, Grafia poses a challenge: how the oppressed body is able to reclaim and transform vulnerability, to empower an individual through visibility. Thus, his work’s lively colors and play on cultural references move the audience to become amused and curious: the victim is no longer seen as weak, helpless, and in need of mercy.
A sight to behold is one of Grafia’s paintings, “Billie Does Europe (Broke and Free),” where the ghostly faces of the audience gasp in complete awe as they watch a spectacle of two boxers fighting in an arena. The use of space in the blocking of the composition inserts a lesson in optics as we proceed to focus on the robust presence of the fighters. Their physical strength is articulated in the contours of the calves and in their stance, perhaps, to announce existence and resistance. Thus, his figurative works contain clues and codes that allude to the mythical ability to become shape-shifters—mercy is not the response to counter oppression but rather empowerment in knowing the potential of a body.
However, the majority of the works in Comeback Kid. offers more than the seriousness and weight of asserting identities. There are moments of sly humor inserted in works like “Our Jimmy of the Flowers (Notre Jimmy des Fleurs),” where a black man dressed similarly to Mamoru Chiba (a character in the Japanese anime Sailor Moon) seduces the audience with his piercing eyes while holding a stem of a rose. The intentional use of such theatrical disguise holds the viewers’ gaze unburdened by the image’s apparent resemblance to the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. His work fictionalizes fundamental personal dilemmas and sheds light on the African-American gay liberation movement.
More than these socio-political entanglements, Grafia’s Comeback Kid. reveals moments of tenderness and liminal nostalgia in longing for “home,” as seen in “Shook by the Move & Moved by the Shake (Confidential Whispers to a Carabao)”, where a pink or violet carabao (depending on your perception) is at the center of a psychedelic rice field. The placement of the carabao and the human figure links the relationships between these two: in stories of migration like that of Grafia’s family and many other Filipino families, there is always a carabao present—to ferry goods, plow the fields, or be sold in exchange for a ticket abroad—always, a vessel for dreams to come true, holding the future of entire families, communities, and a country.
Grafia removes himself from the sentimentality of all of these and remains interested in other ways that a body can transform, evolve, and take up space. In doing so, he probably finds himself right at the same juncture as the ones from the diaspora who had returned before him: entertaining societal pressures to proclaim and define himself—to choose teams.
There is that invisible baggage that we ask generations of Filipinos who had been born, raised, and lived abroad to carry; we want them to say they are more Filipino than European, than American, than anything else. However, these quandaries involving transnational and diaspora identities have not been fully explored since the beginning of diaspora studies in the late 20th Century and perhaps, will stay in progress as the world embraces changes brought by migration, movements, and other ways that identities are produced mainly due to the necessities of a neo-liberal present.
Grafia’s Comeback Kid. humbles itself in the presence of the people with whom it shares its predicaments—in the loving arms of countless grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors waiting for those who have left to somehow return on their terms, as they live comfortably inside bodies that have been liberated from generational trauma to stand in solidarity with those who were left behind.
Comeback Kid. runs until September 10 at Silverlens, 2263 Chino Roces Avenue, Makati City. For more information, visit Silverlens' website.