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.