Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

10 February - 8 September 2024

To Those Sitting in Darkness features new drawings and objects by London-based artist Pio Abad.

Deeply informed by the history of the world and particularly the Philippines, where Abad was born and raised, his works draw out transnational lines between historical incidents and people, and our lives today. Concerned with colonial history and cultural loss, Abad’s poetic, personal and political art offers a powerful critique of the way many museums collect, display and interpret the objects they hold and questions prevailing perceptions and perspectives.

The title is a reference to American writer Mark Twain’s satire ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ (1901), which strongly criticised imperialism.

The exhibition explores, identifies and illuminates objects Abad found in the rich and varied collections of the University of Oxford; his focus on those where their histories have been marginalised, unexplained, ignored or forgotten. His intricately detailed creations are displayed together with other artists’ work alongside ‘diasporic’ objects researched and chosen by Abad from a range of Oxford institutions’ collections and archives, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College and Blenheim Palace.

A major piece is the large-sized drawing ‘I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country’ (2023), based on one of the most important objects in the Ashmolean’s founding collection: ‘Powhatan’s mantle’ (c.1600–1628), a monumental deer-hide hanging with precise shell beadwork ornaments dates to the early 1600s and the first period of contact between Indigenous North American peoples and British colonists. The mantle is named for Wahunsenacawh (c.1550–1618), the chief of the Powhatan people, and also known as the father of Pocahontas.

Using high-resolution photographic scans of the object, Abad has drawn the underside of the mantle to scale. He describes the imaginary map-like work as ‘an atlas for many lands that can never be recovered,’ as a reminder of the erasure of the Native American people that followed the arrival of the British in Wahunsenacawh’s land. Abad links this to the Indian Wars of the 1870s and then to the Philippine-American War, which began in the late 1890s.

Abad was also inspired by a drawing uncovered in the collections at St John’s College of Prince Giolo, a tattooed Filipino slave who was brought to Oxford in the 1680s and exhibited as an exotic curiosity in pubs and other venues. In ‘Giolo’s Lament,’ Abad re-renders Giolo’s tattooed hand through eleven engravings on marble arranged on the gallery’s walls, a moving reminder of his fragile humanity.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum, Abad encountered traditional kris swords from Mindanao (the southern region of the Philippines). The double-edged blades incised with mythic symbols and handles made of precious wood and bone carved in crocodile or bird-like forms were originally owned by Indigenous tribes known as the Moro people, who adapted Islam into their belief system.

These kris swords represent a resistance to colonial rule and conversion to Christianity and speak to historical accounts of dispossession. A selection of these weapons have been resurrected from museum storage for the first time since their accession to be displayed in this exhibition.

Ateneo Art Gallery

19 April to 30 July 2022

Fear of freedom, of which its possessor is not necessarily aware, makes him see ghosts.

- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

For the past decade, a significant part of Pio Abad’s artistic practice has focused on the remembrance of what has been forgotten and even expunged. This direction emanates from a family narrative woven into a nation’s story that began in the locality of this museum and the university.

Abad’s parents, Butch and Dina, met as student activists and community organizers, committed to the cause of the social democratic movement in the 1970s under the growing threat of the Marcos dictatorship. Their work as trade union organizers subjected them to strict surveillance and threats of arrest. In 1980, their release from incarceration in a military camp was negotiated by the Jesuits, led by then Ateneo president Fr. Jose A. Cruz, on the condition that they be placed under “campus arrest” for a year in the Ateneo de Manila University. The couple continued their advocacies as professionals in legal and development work while raising four children. Like his siblings, Abad’s childhood memories involve people and places associated with his parents’ commitment as lifelong activists and as advocates for justice and freedom.

Abad takes on the same critical voice in his art practice, drawing attention to the ostentatious lifestyle of the Marcoses. He transforms their tangible opulence into another form of materiality—as cast, printed, etched, and painted objects. These appropriations are carefully constructed based on factual evidence, photographs, auction catalogs, documents, and archival records.

This exhibition was deliberately set to begin weeks before the May 2022 national elections. It was not expected though that there would be a dire need for such a remembrance project to counter rampant revisions in our nation’s history. Abad provides a radical alternative to the narrative conventions. The very acts of painting, drawing, printing, and erasing are the artist’s way of prompting memory both as a form of knowledge and an agent of remembering, underscoring the relationship of the private to the public; the personal to the political.

Mixed media installation

2023

Shown as part of ‘Small World’, the 13th Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Art Museum

Ivuvun mo yaken du asked nu kuku mo ta pachisuvusuvuay ko du kanen mo a mahutu as pachidiludilupay ko du inumen mo a danum.

Bury me under your fingernails, that I may be eaten along with every food you eat, that I may be drunk along with every cup of water you drink.

Pio Abad’s family is Ivatan, an ethnic group native to the Batanes and Babuyan islands of the northern Philippines. The Yami (Tao) people of Taiwan’s Lanyu island believe their ancestors originated from the Batanes before seeking refuge on Lanyu from Spanish colonizers. Arriving in Lanyu from his base in London, Abad unexpectedly encountered a profound sense of intimate familiarity in an unknown place.

Commissioned for the Taipei Biennial 2023, Abad’s large floor sculpture renders Ivatan poetry. The poems, known as laji, originate in an ancient oral tradition that bears a strong similarity to the language being spoken in Lanyu. Alongside the installation are stacks of booklets of selected laji relating to seafaring, ancestry, and grief, as well as photographs of Abad’s visit to Lanyu island. The text used for the sculptures and booklet are taken from the poetry collection translated to English by Ivatan academic, Florentino Hornedo.

58th Carnegie International

24 September 2022 to 2 April 2023

Pio Abad’s archival and museological research examines the words, images, objects, and deeds of past world leaders and inscribes them in the historical traumas that have shaped our present. For the 58th Carnegie International, the artist examines Andrew Carnegie’s position as an anti-imperialist and industrialist via his 1898 text “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways,” originally published in the North American Review. Here, Carnegie argued against the United States’ annexation of the Philippines, even offering to buy the country’s independence for the sum of $20 million—the price the United States paid to purchase the Philippines from Spain under the Treaty of Paris of 1898, marking the end of the Spanish-American War. Central to Carnegie’s rationale was that the meager annual revenue did not warrant the expense of “running” the colony and that industry, not government, should take on the role of extracting profit from such territories.

Abad’s site-specific work, Distant Possessions (2022), borrows words from Carnegie’s essay on the Philippines, inscribing the phrase “Americans cannot be grown there” above a gallery entryway in the same style etched on the facade of the museum’s original 1895 building. The aesthetic intervention takes up the language of American exceptionalism and benevolence to reflect on the country’s imperialist legacy and cultural fragility today. The piece is in dialogue with Abad’s series Thoughtful Gifts (2019–ongoing), in which the artist has engraved into marble tablets the correspondences between Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda and the administration of former US President Ronald Reagan, a number of which are also on view in this exhibition.

A collaboration with Frances Wadsworth Jones

3D printed veroblack resin, brass, automotive paint and plywood

2022

Shown as part of ‘In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire’, the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Second-hand Time is a speculative reconstruction of the fabled Kokoshnik tiara; a pearl and diamond diadem that was a favourite among the Romanov empresses. After the execution of the Tsar Nicolas II and his family in 1918, the tiara, alongside the rest of the Russian crown jewels, was nationalised by the Bolshevik regime, and in 1927 was auctioned by Christie’s on behalf of Joseph Stalin’s government. The proceeds from the sale were intended to fund agrarian reform in newly Communist Russia – an effort that would prove disastrous, leading to the complete collapse of agricultural production in the Soviet Union.

In February 2016, the Kokoshnik tiara unexpectedly reappeared at the press conference for another auction, this time in Manila. After the fall of the Marcos’ kleptocratic dictatorship in 1986, Imelda’s horde of fine jewellery was seized, the Kokoshnik amongst them. Three decades later, plans were finally announced for a sale, to be held by Christie’s, with the proceeds going towards agrarian reform in the Philippines. However, the victory of Rodrigo Duterte, a Marcos sympathiser, in the presidential elections later that year, and the subsequent election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in 2022, have ensured that the auction of the ill-gotten jewellery has never taken place. The Kokoshnik remains locked in the vault of the Philippine central bank, condemned to a state of irresolution, as the Marcoses engage in widespread historical distortion and reclaim political power.

Using images gathered from news footage and scant documentation, Wadsworth Jones meticulously digitally modelled the Kokoshnik tiara, resulting in a 3D printed resin sculpture that is equal parts forensic reconstruction and creative speculation. In this act of remaking and tracing its outrageous provenance, Abad and Wadsworth Jones transform the luxurious accessory into a spectral witness to endless cycles of upheaval and impunity – an enduring piece of evidence to histories that keep on being rewritten.

Notes on Decomposition attempts to map our current state of cultural disenchantment through a collection of objects bought, sold and sequestered from 1991 to the present – objects that embody specific moments of political and economic decay over the past twenty years, to become an inventory of neoliberal fantasy through decorative things. Composed of 12 large scale drawings and a wall text, the installation follows the path of particularly important global auctions, bringing together a concentrated site to understand the mythologies, domestic lives, laundering practices, and representations, behind these auctioned-off objects. From selling off the confiscated silverware of the Marcoses in 1991 and Lehman Brothers’ Chinese porcelain in 2010, to the first Christie’s auction in Mainland China in 2013 and the sale of Margaret Thatcher’s personal effects in 2015, these all show a global undertaking and interconnectedness of ambition through objects, their beneficiaries and their buyers.

Pio Abad and Stephanie Syjuco

Silverlens Gallery, Manila

7 April - 7 May 2022

At the heels of what is arguably one of the most crucial elections in Philippine history, Crime and Ornament sees the dovetailing of the previous works of Pio Abad and Stephanie Syjuco who, in their separate and related practices, have explored the ontology of dissent—of how it ruptures the everyday while at the same time staying irrevocably rooted in it. Through works that range from the photographic to the installative, from the conceptual to the object-based, the artists traffic at the juncture of where the contemporary moment and the future imaginary intersect, probing how the collective may siege, dismantle, and lay waste the infrastructures of power whose long arms extend into the far corners of what is supposed to be the democratized space of the Internet.

Prompted by different historical convulsions and the equivalent lightning-quick protest reactions on the ground (in the case of Syjuco, the bald-faced rearing of white supremacy that achieved monstrous form in the election of Donald Trump as President of the most powerful country in the world; and, in the case of Abad, the grave-digger’s night burial of the remains of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Heroes’ Cemetery, the Libingan ng Bayani), the works are made to confront not only the possibility of the dictator’s son being installed to the highest position of the land, but also the potency of language—both visual and textual—to throw a monkey’s wrench at what seems to be the smooth, high-functioning operation in the manufacture of content (and, by extension, consent) that makes even the most malodorous names in public life as seductive and preferable.

The material components of Crime and Ornament share the same skin as those found in the streets steeped in the climate of outrage and dissent: banners, photographs, textiles—inert objects that, through the artists’ fierce subjectivities, are transformed into supple vehicles of chronicle and commentary. Potentially able to traffic within the discursive spheres of the social and the political, the works’ tangents of meaning bend toward open-endedness, equipped with their bouquets of thrilling signifiers. The artists’ approaches are wildly different: Abad, through the mechanized language of seriality, disassembles, destabilizes, and desecrates Marcosian iconography while Syjuco reconfigures the slogan of resistance through the transformative labor of human hands.

Aside from archiving the afterlife of protests that already came to pass, the works promise the certainty of new ones erupting: the gallery walls painted with the green of chroma key, for instance, theoretically allow for fresh projections of dissent. Even Abad’s quotation of “THE SEQUEL IS USUALLY WORSE THAN THE ORIGINAL,” while alluding to the fascist aspirations of the incumbent, bristles with premonition in the context of the son following the steps of the nefarious father. What is implicit and insistent is human presence: the bodies of those who bore the banner “BE UNGOVERNABLE” delineated as negative space in the work of Syjuco and the possible wearer of the couture effigy of Abad which presents the repetition of the package of Heinz Sandwich Spread, said to be in copious supply in Malacañang as the preferred condiment of Imelda Marcos—the other half of the conjugal dictatorship.

An inversion of the title of the lecture and manifesto, Ornament and Crime, by the German architect Adolf Loos, which was an indictment of decoration in modern life, the exhibition places the condemnation on the criminal travesty of instrumentalizing the democratic features towards self-gain and self-perpetuation, reclaiming, occasionally through craft-based labor, the fervent yearnings for oppositional relationships, revolutionary impulses, and counternarratives from the torrent of the spectacle. The electricity of these yearnings persists not because historical events are interchangeable, but because the perversions of power are constant and never sleep. Signs fashioned by hands, songs issuing forth from the throat, hands lifted in the air—these are radical embodiments that contravene and serve as an antidote to the abstract, disembodied reaches of tyranny.

Crime and Ornament brings to critical visibility the compulsion to disrupt the vectors through which the dominant ideology flows, whose debauched philosophy is all about forced consensus, subjugation, and control. By slashing a seam so that the energies of the periphery—voices, visions, vocabularies—can rush through, the works of Abad and Syjuco affirm that the grand experiment that is democracy is an open threadwork and that the task of meaning-making should never be trusted solely to the bureaus of the state. Achieving surface texture as silk and cotton, printed and stitched, these works circulate in the air and light of our shared milieu, generate fresh topographies of meaning, and join other modes of action so that alternative/alternate versions of the real may be fabricated. As one of Abad’s scarves declares: “History has its eyes on you.”

— Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes were two young leaders of the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP) who spearheaded the fight for social justice in the United States and democracy in the Philippines. They were murdered in Seattle on the 1st of June 1981 and their killings were eventually linked to the dictatorship through the expenses of a certain Mabuhay Corporation, a San Francisco held company. The statements showed the regime had illegally spent one million dollars in the United States between 1979 and 1981 on various activities, including political campaigns and a mysterious transaction labelled “special security projects.”

For Silme and For Gene are the first works in an ongoing series of paintings that bear witness to the struggles of those who devoted their lives to fighting the dictatorship and its cruel legacy. Abad appropriates the book cover designs of Ferdinand Marcos’ manifestos- which detailed his political motives, including the defense of his decision to place the Philippines under martial law in 1972—but erases the textual basis of Marcos’ political fictions. In reducing them to form and color, he transforms them, as paintings, into austere emblems of a nation that never was.

In this way, the paintings become memorials, abstract elegies to political leaders, community organisers, and student activists who resisted and worked towards imagining a space for freedom under the direst of circumstances: Karina David, Archie Intengan, Bobby Gana, Chito Gascon, Lilli Hilao, Evelio Javier, Boyet Mijares, Jesse Robredo, Dinky Soliman, and Noel Tolentino.

For Dina I and For Dina II, are dedicated to the memory of the artist’s mother, who died in 2017. This project begins with Abad’s mother’s gaze, and, in many ways, it is her loss that has since shaped it. Over the past ten years, his work has become not just an exhaustive attempt at imagining reparation, but also an exhausting, yet necessary, process of grieving.

shown as part of

FOR THE PHOENIX TO FIND ITS FORM IN US. On Restitution, Rehabilitation and Reparation.

Ifa Galerie and Savvy Contemporary, Berlin

24 June to 29 August 2021

Thoughtful Gifts investigates objects and documents uncovered by the artist while researching at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Archives in California. Confuting the myth that the sociopolitical legacy of the Marcoses is one isolated to the Philippines, the works summon a transnational cast of characters that have either been in favour of, or vitiated by the United States’ quest for empire and the perpetuation of its political mythologies.

A seashell-encrusted eagle, a sequin clad gown and a lace fan were some of the items presented to the Reagans during the Marcoses’ controversial state visit to the White House in 1982. They were subsequently categorised as ‘thoughtful gifts’ in the Reagan archives, along with diplomatic presents from the disgraced Guatemalan president Otto Perez Molina and Lucia Hiriart, the wife of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, among others.

A series of large scale drawings retrieves the objects from the bowels of the archive, where their problematic provenance has relegated them. The drawings perform a cartographic function – intricately rendering the details of these objects with ink, and in the process, mapping political alliances that have been obscured for sake of historical convenience.

These acts of memorialisation and retrieval continue in a series of etchings in marble, based on correspondence also uncovered from the Reagan archives. A letter from Ferdinand Marcos to Ronald Reagan, signed off as ‘your faithful servant’, undermines the rhetoric of national self-realisation that the dictator weaponised during his rule. The gesture of inscribing these ephemera onto marble monumentalises the paper trail of empire, functioning as a symbolic recuperation of a repressed chapter in American history and a material repudiation of ongoing attempts at historical revisionism.

www.janeryanandwilliamsaunders.com is the digital iteration of The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders, an ongoing project that traces the contours of Philippine dispossession by reconstructing Imelda Marcos' jewellery collection.

An important part of the project has been finding different ways to disseminate these artefacts and unlock the histories of impunity contained within. Alongside the digital display, the public is invited to take ownership of the Marcos Collection through Augmented Reality, placing these spectral objects in their own domestic spaces and imagining possibilities of restitution that remain elusive in the present day.

exhibited as part of Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs

Dear Yeyey, Cosmin, Inti and Marie

I hope this finds you all well. Since the Supreme Court ruling last week and the horrific burial yesterday, I have been trying to work out what to do with my contribution to the exhibition. My initial proposal for the works seemed too mannered and still confined to a particular historical conversation that not everyone is familiar with. Withdrawing the works entirely seems to be an impotent way of dealing with the situation.

I just know that this isn't the time to be talking about the whimsical fantasies of a dictatorship. It is the time to confront the painful realities the Marcoses have continued to inflict on the Filipino people and what that means for the country and for the region. I would like to somehow implicate these works in an act of indignation.

I have decided that the best thing to do is tocover both works entirely in black paint (including the frames) while retaining the titles of the work, Ferdinand as Malakas, Imelda as Maganda. I then request that the paintings tour in this state, with a small photograph of the paintings in their original form installed alongside.

I would like to know your thoughts and it would be great if we can work on this as soon as possible.

Best,

Pio

A collaboration with Frances Wadsworth Jones

Twenty-four reconstructions of pieces from the Hawaii Collection, modelled from photographs taken by Christie’s.

3D printed plastic, brass and dry-transfer text

2019

On the 27th of February 1986, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos arrived in Hawaii after being granted safe haven by Ronald Reagan’s government. The deposed dictator and his wife stepped off a U.S. Air Force plane onto a 150 foot red carpet rolled onto the tarmac of Hickam Air Force Base.

 In the two C-141 transport planes that carried them, they had packed 23 wooden crates, 12 suitcases and bags, and various boxes, whose contents included 413 pieces of jewellery, packed amongst disposable diapers.

 The jewellery, which would be referred to in court documents as the Hawaii Collection, was immediately confiscated by United States Customs upon their arrival. Seized items included an extremely rare 25 carat pink diamond worth $5 million and a pearl and diamond tiara taken from the Russian tsar’s family in1918.

 Shortly after their seizure, the Hawaii Collection was repatriated to the Philippines and turned over to the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG), the agency tasked with the sequester and liquidation of the Marcos ill-gotten assets.  For over three decades, they languished in the vaults of the Philippine Central Bank, hidden from public view amidst legal challenges from the Marcos family.

 In February 2016, the PCGG announced that all legal impediments had been cleared for the pieces to go to auction with a planned public exhibition to precede the sale. Jewellery experts from Christie’s arrived in Manila to examine and evaluate the pieces.

 Unfortunately, the election of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte put an end to these plans. Shortly after assuming office in May 2016, he ordered the reinternment of Ferdinand Marcos’ corpse in the National Heroes Cemetery and announced moves to begin dismantling the PCGG – its responsibilities being transferred to the Office of the Solicitor General, a position currently held by an avowed Marcos loyalist.

 The jewellery has not been seen since.

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

9 June - 27 September 2020

With Pio Abad, Liu Chuang, Hikaru Fujii, Dale Harding, Yukihisa Isobe, Asako Iwama, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jumana Manna, mixrice, Tom Nicholson, The Propeller Group and Superflex, Alexandra Pirici. Curated by Kyongfa Che (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo) and Elodie Royer (KADIST).

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and KADIST present the exhibition Things Entangling, the culmination of a major, long-term curatorial collaboration.

Trees, fossils, books, artifacts—these are some of our companions as we live in and make sense of the world. They are protagonists in our reconstructions of the past and constructions of the present, as both individuals and societies. They may create their own meaning through their own agency, or gain it from our use and circulation of them—even our discarding of them. They have the ability to configure social realities, cultural identities, and human subjectivities. Against a global context of challenging ecological and sociopolitical changes, this exhibition features artworks that trace and animate the trajectories, nexuses, and mutations of things, in which realities and histories collide and reverberate continuously. These things entangling are not framed as fixed but as always in process. They might be material objects or living subjects, but they are always also mediators of meaning, ideology, and value.

From installation to video, photography, and collage, the artworks effectively make silent things speak thanks to new assemblages that unearth hidden histories of the subordinated, follow nature’s evolutions under the brutal circumstances of capitalism, imagine the repatriation of cultural heritage, and decipher the unfulfilled aspirations underlying historical and contemporary dislocations. When the twelve invited artists invoke anthropology, archaeology, or historiography to seek rootedness or to probe resonances with specific moments and places, they aim less to excavate or clarify the past than to open up a new politics of interpretation for building the present. Haunted by different time spans and territories, positions and subjectivities, they examine how the apparatuses of our societies and cultures are transformed by various forces, including energies of nature, human interest, and abiding beliefs.

Via speculation and imagination, Things Entangling draws our attention to the hidden lives of things and their multifaceted interactions, and explores how reconstructing, animating, or restoring their agency could prompt us to revisit or even reposition ourselves in our current society and environment, facing as we do unprecedented natural and human-made crises. Longing for desirable futures, the artists aim to reveal unexpected intersections, elusive networks, and fleeting affinities between things.

In 2010, after a successful bid to gain a seat in the Philippine House of Representatives, Imelda Marcos gave out a number of seashell decorated clocks with her face imprinted on them as a Christmas present to her fellow congressmen and women, including the artist’s father. Although his father immediately rejected the gift, for Pio Abad the gesture became symbolic of an insidious kind of soft power and the seashells a bizarre shorthand for ornament as corruption. In Decoys, a series of dummy CCTV cameras encrusted with tropical seashells, Abad applies this process of ‘decoration as corruption’ onto what he considers metonyms of state control and, in the process, creates failed objects – discrete and authoritative observers transformed into elaborate and decadent dummies.

Culminating his residency in San Francisco, Pio Abad’s solo exhibition Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite draws from multiple histories of exile, resistance, and displacement from the ’70s and ’80s that brought Filipinos to California, home today to one of the largest diasporas of this community in the world.

The newly commissioned body of work departs from narratives related to the former Filipino dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, and his infamously extravagant wife, Imelda. Choreographing a confluence of historical facts, Abad first unearths the objects and archival material as proof of a perpetuated political fantasy that allowed the Marcoses to cling to their gilded power. An ostentatious 30-carat ruby bracelet with diamonds and cultured pearls materializes in the gallery as Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite (2019), a colossal concrete effigy realized in collaboration with the jeweler Frances Wadsworth Jones. The jewels, along with silverware, Old masters, and other lavish goods belonging to the Marcoses, was smuggled into the United States in 1986 when they fled the Philippines following widespread anti-government protests across the country. Known today as the Hawaii Collection, the jewels were immediately seized by U.S. customs when they landed in Honolulu after being granted exile by the Reagan administration. Valued at a combined worth of twenty-one million U.S. dollars, the ill-gotten assets were eventually repatriated to the Philippines (their rightful owners) to be auctioned off and liquidated. However, shortly after President Rodrigo Duterte assumed office in 2016–a self-declared admirer of Marcos–and despite Philippine Supreme Court ruling that the jewelry was illegally acquired, no action to sell the loot has been taken yet. They remain locked in a bank vault in Manila, obscured from public consciousness and condemned to a permanent state of irresolution. Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite unmoors the bracelet from the vaults of the autocratic regime, manipulating scale and function to contrast the weight and monumentality of the bracelet in concrete with the corporeal frailty of the bodies it also represents.

Complicating the functions of a monument, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite simultaneously memorializes the bracelet as a body–of evidence and of the many exiled bodies upended by the Marcos dictatorship–while slyly toying with the farcical monumentality of Imelda's sense of self as nation. The bracelet at once interrogates the losses and victories, the singular and the multiple, and the people and nation. Further articulating these complexities, a photograph of a hand clutching a piece of barbed wire, hangs adjacent to the sculpture. The image was taken by photojournalist Kim Komenich in Manila in 1986 on the day that the regime was overthrown.

Confuting the myth that the sociopolitical legacy of the Marcoses is one isolated to the Philippines, the exhibition summons a transnational cast of characters that have either been in favor of, or vitiated by the United States quest for empire and the perpetuation of its political mythologies. A Thoughtful Gift (2019) records a version of a letter written by First Lady Nancy Reagan to Imelda Marcos in 1986, assuring her of their safety from persecution in the United States, onto a tablet of Carrara marble. The gesture of inscribing the letter onto marble functions as symbolic recuperation and concretizes the complicity, extent, and aftermath of the Marcos-Reagan friendship and the flippant deployment of protection from the United States defense at the highest level, long after the country’s independence and despite recommendations from the State Department to remove Marcos from power. A Thoughtful Gift rings the bell on historical revisionism, erected as a marker for histories that have been unintentionally or intentionally altered.

Revealing the underbelly of sociopolitical mechanisms that still allow authoritarianism to manifest today, Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite performs an elegy for those whose efforts were muted by the absolute power that perpetuates empires and dictatorships, for painful personal histories and imminent collective futures.

Since 2014, Abad has been interested in the auction as a site for excavating these narratives and the auction catalogue as a document where the private histories of public personages are laid bare. The three red-ground cloisonne vases depicted in the triptych work Notes on Decomposition (Lot 157) are from Margaret Thatcher collection of personal effects, auctioned off by Christie’s in 2019. These artefacts were presented to the former British Prime Minister by Dr. Tze-chi Chao, President of the World League of Freedom & Democracy, Republic of China chapter.

‘Living well is the best revenge’ taunts the first drawing of Pio Abad’s latest series, It Seems We Have Developed A Taste for Each Other’s Weaknesses. With these eighteen works on paper, Abad identifies and depicts pill boxes from the collections of the former heads of state, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher and United States President Ronald Reagan to offer a provocative insight into these leaders’ most private vulnerabilities. At once charming and unsettling, this latest phase of Abad’s ongoing series Notes on Decomposition incriminates the two late politicians in today’s global crisis with elegance and wry cheek.

Abad’s tactility renders the eerie pill boxes in his signature graphic style, transforming the kitschy ornaments into beautiful and satirical illustrations. The intimacy of his artistic process mirrors the intimacy of these objects wherein both occur in domestic spaces. Symbolic flora and animals – occasionally augmented by acerbic idioms – adorn the tops of many vessels. Others feature corny displays of patriotism such as the Pledge of Allegiance encircled by American flags or London’s Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Among this assemblage, Abad also manages to pinpoint and render a blue pill box, featuring the US Presidential Seal encircled by five five-point stars, in Thatcher and Reagan’s respective collections; gifted to them both by Ambassador and Mrs. Charles H. Price II – a small yet fateful commonality, further echoing their enduring partnership.

In keeping with Notes on Decomposition, which centres on auction as archaeological site, Abad excavates his source material from the catalogues of Mrs Thatcher – Property from the Collection of The Right Honourable The Baroness Thatcher of Keveston, LG, OM, FRS (Christie’s London, 2015) and The Private Collection of President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan (Christie’s New York, 2016). The auction is the ‘primary venue for objects to be fetishized, laundered and mythologized,’ according to Abad. I echo his sentiment, having worked at Christie’s for several years, and add my observation that the auction is a passive institution wary of taking any ideological stance, thus allowing legally permissible, yet controversial sales to occur.

When collections such as those Abad considers for Notes on Decomposition (Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Lehmann Brothers, Jeffrey Archer, Thatcher and Reagan) pass through the sale room – usually due to the three D’s: Divorce, Debt, or Death – they undergo a transformation from private homeware to temporary public artefact. Once bought, the object tends to vanish into the collection of its new owner with only the auction catalogue providing proof of its existence. These publications therefore function as tombstones, providing Abad with the ideal excavation site to uncover the network of political parties liable for historic, economic and political crises. These relationships, which may initially appear superficial, are rendered authentic when domestic objects reveal personal connections. Abad’s chosen medium – drawing – manifests this mapping in praxis by tracing the contours of Christie’s photography unto new paper with pen and gouache and creating a cartography of neoliberal fantasy through these decorative objects.

Abad embarked on It Seems We Have Developed A Taste For Each Other’s Weaknesses while confined to his London home during the UK’s national Covid-19 lockdown and amid conditions of rising casualities and economic uncertainty. In choosing to portray Thatcher and Reagan’s pill boxes at this time, the artist shrewdly shatters the pair’s temporality and connects them to the present global pandemic. Beginning with Thatcher and Reagan, Professor Vicente Navarro of Johns Hopkins University outlines the consequences of neoliberalism in the present pandemic; he points to the UK and US governments’ ‘deregulation of globalization of capital and labour, alongside policies of social austerity,’ and the ‘cutting of public funds for services that guarantee the population’s well-being’ as the main factors that have allowed this pandemic to persist. I even speculate the complex commodification of foreign workers stemming from neoliberal globalization has likely contributed to the disproportionate number of causalities among Filipino healthcare workers.

With these culpabilities in mind, one might experience a naughty satisfaction in Abad’s It Seems We Have Developed A Taste for Each Other’s Weaknesses, which indeed titillates a dry affinity for Thatcher and Reagan’s fragilities. These vibrant drawings of pill boxes, exhumed from auction, betray the two’s projected mental fortitude and conviction by implying their abject mortality and sickness. Abad’s drawings briefly offer guilt-free delight at these figures’ demise by incriminating their complicity in today’s tragedy. Further gratification might be found in the notion the heirs sardonically fulfilled their parents’ own neoliberal legacies by reducing traces of their private lives to fiscal commodities. However, the wicked realization that their progeny gained millions of dollars from these sales is sobering – a stark contrast to the millions of citizens reeling from the legacies of the Iron Lady and the Gipper.

Text by Marv Recinto

Remember this House, is the first permanent public artwork by leading British-Filipino artist Pio Abad. It takes the form of two murals on Kilburn High Road and Burton Road that are inspired by vanitas still life paintings. Emerging as an art form in the 16th century, vanitas paintings intended to symbolise the fragility of human life through the depiction of objects, which were mainly goods and artefacts brought into Europe for the first time from colonised countries. Abad shares this interest in the lives and meaning of objects which he looks at as carriers of narratives, each one able to contain an entire collection of histories, geographies and emotional journeys.

The objects presented in the murals reveal an unexpected history of Kilburn High Road by bringing together artefacts from the Brent Museum Archives, ornaments of personal significance shared by local residents and items that Abad photographed on the high road. Among them, an ashtray from the Empire Windrush, a face mask made from African wax fabric, a hand-painted Romanian Easter egg, a traditional Somalian leather bag decorated with seashells and a wooden clock from Fiji in the shape of a turtle.

In creating these contemporary vanitas murals, Abad commemorates how the complex, and often painful, history of colonialism has shaped the communities living on Kilburn High Road, while also celebrating the people from the area, whose stories are embedded within the objects.

Splendour is the first public exhibition in Canada of the work of London, UK-based artist, Pio Abad. The exhibition features objects and images that draw connections between specific moments of political and economic upheaval, from the fall of Cold War era dictatorships that erroneously heralded ‘the end of history’ to the economic crises of 2008 that brought us to our current age of political disenchantment.

Taking its title from a play by Abi Morgan, which takes place in a drawing room where four women contemplate the imminent collapse of an unnamed autocracy, the exhibition imagines Gairloch Gardens as the domestic setting of another scene of political devolution and decay. Among other things, a seashell clock once belonging to Imelda Marcos, photographs of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s chintzy interiors, replicas of Margaret Thatcher’s black leather handbag, and drawings of the Lehman Brothers’ collection of Chinese porcelain occupy the rooms of the former lake house to comprise an inventory of neoliberal fantasy through decorative things.

Splendour  continues Abad’s on-going interest in the role that domestic objects play in these narratives. Deployed strategically by those in power, they are often the only things left to remain after the inevitable fall from grace – artefacts and auguries of cyclical histories. Drawing on Gairloch Gardens’ status as an architectural copy of HG Wells’ Surrey home, Splendour reflects on the roles of repetition and mistranslation in our understanding of history and asks how we might meaningfully go forward at this moment of worldwide political unease.

Twenty-four Chinese porcelain from the Lehmann Brothers collection, arranged in descending order according to auction value.

Ultramarine blue India ink on Heritage woodfree paper, dry transfer text

2019

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney
14 May to 9 July 2016

Art Basel Hong Kong
21 March - 25 March 2017

Consisting of 180 counterfeit replicas of this same handbag, Not a Shield, but a Weapon examines Margaret Thatcher’s problematic legacy in the unlikeliest of places, tracing the effects of trade liberalisation on the city of Marikina in the Philippines, where the bags were produced. Once a thriving site of leather production with over 2,000 manufacturers, Marikina suffered from the easing of trade restrictions in the early 90s when the Philippines joined the World Trade Organisation and has been in decline ever since. The influx of imported goods effectively drowned the local market and production was unable to compete with the cheap labour provided by an awakening China. Marikina became collateral damage in the neoliberal world order that was envisioned in part by Margaret Thatcher.

Presented in Hong Kong on the 20th anniversary of the Handover and at a particular moment of crisis in British politics, the work accrues another layer of context, simultaneously embodying Filipino labour as capital and the shards of an Empire unable to come to terms with its own demise.

Edwina Currie, one of Thatcher’s former ministers, once that said that her handbag was ‘not a shield, but a weapon.’ A designation that seems all too appropriate given historical hindsight.

Kadist, Paris
24 February - 16 April 2017

There is an expression in French which refers to observing something via its absence, through hollow spots (en creux). This describes achieving indirect insight of a situation, a way of reading between the lines. Hollowness can relate to the field of archeology, a discipline that speculates from existing objects and studies their manufacture, by man, to retrace the story of their use within their social context.

The notion of the 'biography' of objects, as developed by anthropologists Igor Kopytoff and Arjun Appardurai , has brought attention to the artifacts themselves, their physical and legal trajectories; traveling from one owner and context to the next, each chapter adding a layer to the object’s history and value. The immutability of objects is confronted to the mutation of their interpretation.

"…today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom." (A. Appadurai, The Thing Itself)

The exhibition Conceal, cover with sand, replicate, translate, restore presents artistic projects dealing with objects in situations of conflict, and their role as vehicle or witness. The works are shown at different stages of their existence to underline the artists’ methods, an articulation of historical references combined with a response to current political issues. Pio Abad inventories the art collection of Filipino conjugal dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos (1965-1986), and the propaganda artworks they commissioned, while the current regime tries to revive their memory. Chrysanthi Koumianaki compiles political slogans from the streets of Athens and translates them into a cryptic, timeless alphabet.

These works also take part in the broader discussion around the conservation and restitution of artifacts, in the framework of the decolonial process and literature of these past decades. By reproducing Mimbres plates, Mariana Castillo Deball enquires about their function and underlines mistaken restorations that led to different interpretations. Alexandra Pirici’s ongoing action will put at stake the restitution of the Parthenon marbles by the British Museum to the Acropolis Museum. Baris Dogrusöz’ video presents a study of the archaeological site of Europos Dura in Syria, where burying the citadel became a resistance strategy. While we face international crises that perpetuate conflicts of interests and underline the relationship between art and power, governance can be read through the question of cultural heritage.

The installation Studies from a Forgotten Monument occupies the gallery floor with 327 plaster casts of Anastacio Caedo’s portrait study of Ninoy Aquino. In 1986, the renowned monument builder was commissioned to create a bronze statue of the national hero on the corner of Ayala Avenue and Paseo de Roxas in Makati. Caedo chose to immortalize Aquino at the precise moment of his assassination, shot in the head as he descended the steps of the China Airlines flight that brought him back to the Philippines after three years in exile. Caedo’s portrayal was deemed too depressing, not in keeping with the triumphal spirit that Ninoy’s death brought to the political landscape, and it was subsequently replaced with a more conventional statue. Abad’s installation revisits Caedo’s version – its insistent portrayal of terror and sacrifice a more appropriate symbol for the less triumphant times of now.

CCA Glasgow
17 September - 30 October 2016

Silverlens, Manila
28 March - 29 April 2017

In COUNTERNARRATIVES, Pio Abad continues his engagement with Philippine political history, specifically looking at the problematic cultural legacy of the Marcos dictatorship in light of recent attempts to rehabilitate this dark chapter in the nation's history. This new body of work reconfigures familiar narratives and excavates dismantled idonographies in an attempt to understand the seemingly breathtaking pace at which this history has unravelled.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a collection of short stories and novellas by the American author John Keene that draws upon multiple accounts - memoirs, newspaper articles and speculative fiction - to offer new perspectives on the past and present. Abad uses the same approach throughout the exhibition, translating stories from historical residue into images and objects that reflect on acts of mythmaking, monumentalising and forgetting.

Accessing and reimaginging these artefacts from our collective political imagination, Pio Abad raises questions about how they might play into our current lives, when images that were once ridiculous now seem lethal and objects that used to be fragments of the past now appear to be glimpses into an increasingly perilous future.

In 1973, Former first lady Imelda Marcos had invited the Italian film star turned photographer Gina Lollobrigida to produce a coffee book on the Philippines. Lollobrigida ended up photographing the Tasadays, a tribe of allegedly primitive forest dwellers, “discovered” in the early 1970s as living in complete isolation from society. The Tasadays were later found to have been entirely manufactured by the Marcoses, who pressured a Mindanao tribe to put on the appearance of living a Stone Age lifestyle.

In this series, My Dear, There Are Always People Who Are Just A Little Faster, More Brilliant and More Aggressive, Abad uses the confluence of characters in this bizarre episode to reflect on the attempts of Imelda to create an image of civility during the onset of Martial law - Tasaday and Lollobrigida fully encapsulating the absurd spectrum of characters made complicit in the weaving of this narrative. By transposing this narrative onto a silk scarf, Abad reconfigures this grand vision into a domestic one as he attempts to create what he calls ‘ergonomic representations’ of the complex network of political and artistic alliances, fraudulent ideologies and intimate, often petty, histories that have shaped our notion of Philippine modernity.

Not A Shield, but a Weapon is an installation of 100 newly reproduced bespoke handbags, which traces the effects of trade liberalisation on the city of Marikina in the Philippines, where the bags were produced. Once a thriving site of leather manufacturing, Marikina suffered from the easing of trade restrictions in the early 90s and has been in decline since. Abad’s installation proposes a direct link between Margaret Thatcher’s problematic legacy and the history of the city. The handbags are modelled around Thatcher’s black leather Asprey, which was auctioned in 2011 and sold for £25,000 in a charity sale held by the disgraced Tory peer Jeffrey Archer. The installation examines the seemingly arbitrary way that objects are valued and considers the various forces that create the counterfeit object – from economic policies that become destructive in its attempts at cohesion, to misguided lifestyle aspirations that are shaped by colonial legacies and capitalist diktats.

The Cultural Center of the Philippines opened to great fanfare on the 10th September 1969. Sitting on 77 hectares of reclaimed land along Manila Bay, the CCP was designed by the architect Leandro Locsin as the nucleus of Imelda Marcos’ vision for a ‘New Society’. It forms part of a complex of Modernist buildings that played host to various cultural and economic spectacles in the 1970’s and 1980’s, designed to distract the public from less savoury manifestations of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’ conjugal dictatorship. 

A tessellated slice of this history provides the basis for Oh! Oh! Oh! (A Universal History of Iniquity). Here, a repeated image of a chandelier from Leandro Locsin’s Philippine Plaza Hotel - built to host the delegates of the 1976 International Monetary Fund Meeting in Manila - forms a wallpaper pattern that serves as the backdrop for a seemingly unrelated history to play out. A series of ersatz gold plastic bottles, drenched as much in architectural bathos as the sweet scent of cheap perfume, are arranged into an impoverished tableau of Middle Eastern progress, specifically, Dubai. These supposedly aspirational objects, in reality purchased from street markets frequented by the immigrant community of East London, present another narrative of progress as performance. An intoxicating vision that, after the global financial crisis of 2008, has proven as fictional as Imelda’s New Society – one more civilisation built on sand.

By diminishing these architectural representations, modernity as wallpaper, monumentality as cheap perfume, the installation considers these histories in ergonomic terms and explores the shared domestic dreams behind these representations. The IMF meeting in Manila in 1976 was intended to announce the arrival of the Philippines on the global capitalist stage, serving as the catalyst for the large-scale export of Philippine labour to the Middle East. In this way not only did Filipino workers learn to share the dream of Dubai, they were fundamental to its construction.

Gasworks, London
12 September - 16 November 2014

Postcard reproductions of Old Master paintings sequestered from Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and sold by Christie’s on behalf of the Philippine Commission on Good Government.

97 sets, unlimited copies.

Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong
14 December 2015 - 13 February 2016

For the second edition of the Night Tube pocket map Art on the Underground have commissioned London-based Filipino artist Pio Abad to create a new work for the cover. Abad has taken inspiration from an unusual item he found in Transport for London’s Lost Property Office.

The stuffed gorilla, complete with his Hawaiian shirt, is one of the most unusual objects to be found on the London Underground and invites questions as to how he was forgotten. Abad has drawn a portrait of the stuffed toy in a detailed linear style, using many of the recognisable colours of the Tube lines. Eddie, as the gorilla is fondly called by the staff at the Lost Property Office, becomes a mascot of the unexpected encounters of nocturnal London.

Royal Academy Schools, London

Since 2012 Pio Abad has been using the silk scarf as a surface for depicting alternative or repressed histories of power. 

 In his ongoing series, Every Tool Is A Weapon If You Hold It Right,  we witness contemporary interpretations of the vanitas still life. The portrayed objects, from tools in the artist's studio to artefacts bearing specific histories of loss and degradation, are transferred onto a luxurious surface to tell a more universal narrative. These scarves serve as a reminder that ultimately every image ends up being co-opted and mistranslated by capital and the human desires that drive it. The title is taken from an Ani diFranco song; a rephrasing of Walter Benjamin’s ‘there is no document of civilization which is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism’ as a pop song lyric.

In the new works from the series, Abad introduces another historical layer as a backdrop to these compositions. In 1975, Philippine First Lady Imelda Marcos commissioned the Italian actress turned photographer Gina Lollobrigida to create a coffee table book on the Philippines. Lollobrigida travelled around the country documenting artists at work, farmers toiling in the fields, provincial festivals and even a counterfeit Stone Age tribe. Her highly saturated and orientalised images of local culture portrayed a modern country embracing indigenous tradition – a representation in stark contrast to the violent reality of a country under martial rule. The repeated tableau on these scarves shows the Filipino Modernist painter Hernando R. Ocampo, known for his abstract paintings based on military camouflage, sketching a female nude in his studio.

EVA International Biennial
16 April - 17 July 2016

105 Degrees and Rising takes its title from the secret radio code used by the United States Army to signal the evacuation of Saigon on the 29th of April 1975. In this custom designed wallpaper, Pio Abad conscripts two found visual sources: the ERDL camouflage developed by the US military for the jungles of Vietnam, and the well-known 1976 pinup poster of the American actress Farah Fawcett in a red swimsuit. While the original radio call signalled America’s final dramatic retreat from its ignominious war in Indochina, Abad’s wallpaper infiltrates the space with a more unrelenting depiction of imperialism, one that colonises collective fantasies as it occupies geopolitical space – soft and hard power colluding to create something at once seductive and abject.

Transcript of government report on Imelda Marcos' trip to the Soviet Union for Konstantin Chernenko's state funeral and photographic reproductions of Yugoslav naïf paintings sequestered by the Philippine Commission on Good Government shortly after the Marcoses' ouster in February 1986.

Vinyl cut lettering and Digital C-prints on Endura Premier Paper

The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders is an ongoing research project that spans a number of solo and group exhibitions from 2014. The project draws attention to the roles that certain artefacts have played in the recent history of the Philippines, specifically in shaping the cultural legacy of former Philippine dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and the absurd postcolonial ideology they enforced under the auspices of capitalist democracies during the Cold War. Using inexpensive reproduction techniques, Abad recreates items from their lavish collection of Regency-era silverware, old master paintings of uneven quality and dubious provenance and, curiously, Yugoslav naïf paintings on glass.

In reconstructing this inventory, Abad identifies how the Marcoses’ brand of civility was carefully choreographed and performed in ways that overshadowed many less triumphant histories and facts, from amusing anecdotes to far graver social ills. As a glaring example of the incongruous nationalist ideology that they sought to establish during their plunderous regime, Jane Ryan and William Saunders were the false identities used by the couple to register their account with Credit Suisse Zurich in 1968, the first of many accounts that enabled them to transform $10 billion from the Philippine treasury into private wealth.

Every Tool Is A Weapon If You Hold It Right is a series of unique digital prints on silk. The title is taken from an Ani diFranco song; a rephrasing of Walter Benjamin’s ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not, at the same time, a document of barbarism’ as a pop song lyric. The lyric also reappears as an epigraph in Empire, Hardt and Negri’s book that proposes the next chapter to global politics.

The work offers similar acts of translations and reoccurrences. Intricate ink drawings become transferred onto a silk square, each object selected precisely to create a constellation of images; within each scarf is an ever-expanding narrative that cuts across different histories. While reading the Sunday Times the artist came across Ziyah Gafic’s photographs of objects, which form part of the International Missing Persons Archive, excavated from unidentified bodies and laid out in forensic formats. At the conservation laboratory at the National Museum of the Philippines, he found the modes of classification disintegrate as Imelda Marcos’ shoes lay side by side ivory tusks retrieved from a sunken Spanish galleon found in the South China Sea. From his home province of Batanes, a seashell collection and flotsam gathered along the shores of the beach.

For the artist, these works serve as contemporary interpretations of the vanitas still life. In this case, objects bearing specific histories of loss and degradation are transferred onto a luxurious surface to tell a more universal narrative. Each silk scarf serves as a reminder that ultimately every image, personal or ethnographic, traumatic or heraldic, ends up being co-opted and mistranslated by capital and the human desires that drive it.

Zabludowicz Collection, London
11 April - 19 May 2013

The installation, consisting of a mannequin, wallpaper, a pair of Republican Party underwear and a poster, considers the historical permutations of the word Dazzler. First, as the Dazzle camouflage pattern developed by female students at the Royal Academy in London to disguise naval vessels at sea during the First World War. Then, as The Disco Dazzler, a 1980’s comic book super-heroine modelled after the Hollywood starlet Bo Derek and created when disco culture, through Casablanca Records, was beginning to be embraced by corporate interests. The Disco Dazzler disposes of her enemies by transforming sonic vibrations into blinding flashes of light – a disorientating function similar to that of the Glare Mout Dazzler, a non-lethal visual disruption laser first used in the Falklands War and subsequently employed by the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan from the early 2000s to serve as an ‘irrefutable, multi-lingual, cross-cultural warning that they mean business.’