Pio abad biography template

Decoy , A Universal History of Iniquity , Digitally printed wallpaper, plastic perfume in the shape of a camel, a palace, a scimitar, the Burj al Arab and the Burj Khalifa, and narra wooden shelves. Instagram , opens in a new tab. Artsy , opens in a new tab. WeChat , opens in a new tab. His works are exhibited together with select works by other artists such as Filipino artist Carlos Villa , as well as objects from Oxford collections, chosen by the artist.

The exhibition "maps one example of how art can trouble institutional norms through interference and imaginative reconstruction". Sam Thorne, a jury member running the Japan House cultural center in London, said that Abad's work feels timely, raising questions about restitution. Abad is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Once a thriving site of leather production with over 2, 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.

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 immutability of objects is confronted to the mutation of their interpretation. 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. Pio Abad inventories the art collection of Filipino conjugal dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos , 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.

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. In , 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.

Pio abad biography template

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 , Former first lady Imelda Marcos had invited the Italian film star turned photographer Gina Lollobrigida to produce a coffee book on the Philippines. 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.

Not A Shield, but a Weapon is an installation of 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.

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 A tessellated slice of this history provides the basis for Oh!

A Universal History of Iniquity. 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.

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

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.

In the new works from the series, Abad introduces another historical layer as a backdrop to these compositions. 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. These achievements reflect his influential role in addressing political histories through art on an international platform. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people.

He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad. Artists submissions. Skip to blog sidebar navigations. Whether you're interested in art education, exhibitions, events, talks, new artworks or anything in between, our newsletter has something for everyone. So don't miss out - sign up today and join the community of savvy subscribers who stay ahead of the curve!