The photographs on the museum wall show a frail, elderly man, posed in different ways against a tangle of bedsheets. He’s in his early 80s, and the suffering in his face is obvious. But the portraits are also whimsical: the man half-hides his face in a pile of flowers, or wears a crown and a cascade of beads. His exhausted eyes peer out from behind a patterned mask.
These photographs of the late Filipino artist David Medalla, a fixture of London’s art scene for decades, were not originally meant to be displayed. They were composed as “an act of defiance” against the 2016 stroke that left Medalla largely paralyzed, said Adam Nankervis, the artist’s longtime partner and collaborator.
