• Work
  • about
  • press
  • publications
    • Things Entangling
    • Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite
    • Splendour
    • 1975 - 2015
    • Some Are Smarter Than Others
    • For Anti-Imperialist Peace, Solidarity and Friendship
    • 1986 - 2010
  • Contact

Pio Abad

  • Work
  • about
  • press
  • publications
    • Things Entangling
    • Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite
    • Splendour
    • 1975 - 2015
    • Some Are Smarter Than Others
    • For Anti-Imperialist Peace, Solidarity and Friendship
    • 1986 - 2010
  • Contact

105 Degrees and Rising

 

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.

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