Spike Island presents Nosferasta, a new commission by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer in collaboration with Oba

ADAM KHALIL AND BAYLEY SWEITZER WITH OBA
NOSFERASTA
5 February to 8 May 2022

Spike Island presents Nosferasta, a new commission by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer in collaboration with Oba. 

Nosferasta is the first iteration of a Rastafarian vampire film project starring and co-written by Oba, a Trinidadian artist and musician based in Brooklyn. The film reimagines Oba’s origin story; a nightmarish chronicle of colonial encounters dating back to 1492. Having been shipped as cargo from West Africa to the Caribbean, Oba is seduced and bitten by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring an undying allegiance to the colonial project. Together this unlikely duo spread vampirism across the Western Hemisphere, pulling the strings of ‘New World’ geopolitics until Oba encounters Rastafarianism, an anticolonial religion, which, with a little help from the Devil’s lettuce, enables him to finally break Columbus’ spell. 

The film combines cinematic period scenes with unscripted vignettes of Oba’s post-vampiric, present-day existence. These portray his real-life struggles with the colonial bureaucracy that he helped devise, including his pursuit of U.S. citizenship and literacy. Flitting between film forms, timelines, locations and perspectives, Nosferasta tells the story of an ageing Rastafarian vampire reckoning with the impact of colonialism. It examines the guilt surrounding his complicity in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question: How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?

Watching over the exhibition space is a votive demon sculpture made by Oba, which whispers a timeline of the major events in vampire history that have shaped colonial modernity to this day. An upright, coffin-like form, its gory painted exterior depicts a vampire after a recent bite, dripping blood and bedecked with shells, crystals, jewels and sequins. Elsewhere in the gallery are a series of colourful hand-painted and stencilled t-shirts, also made by Oba, which reference key themes, phrases and iconography from the Nosferasta project.