Pio Abad on the stories objects keep — and the histories they resist
In a new podcast conversation, Filipino artist Pio Abad (b. 1983) traces the influences that have shaped his practice, moving from family history to literature, music, and the artists he returns to most often. Speaking with Ben Luke, he reflects on a body of work that treats objects not as inert things, but as carriers of memory, power, and political residue.
Abad’s installations bring together fine pen drawings, textiles, photography, and text. That range of materials mirrors the range of concerns in his work, which has long been anchored in the history of the Philippines. His parents were involved in the struggle against Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, and the regime’s propaganda, violence, and international entanglements remain central to his thinking.
More recently, Abad has widened his focus to collections of art and artifacts, examining the histories of theft, exploitation, and extraction that often sit behind them. He describes his large-scale forensic drawings as a form of “excessively remembering,” a phrase that captures both the precision and the moral urgency of his approach. The work is not simply archival; it is a deliberate effort to keep difficult histories visible.
The interview also turns to Pacita Abad, his aunt, whose artistic legacy continues to shape his own trajectory. Abad speaks about his role as curator of her estate, and about the formal discipline he admires in Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose work balances political weight with restraint. He also names Henri Michaux, Egon Schiele, Jorge Luis Borges, Hisham Matar, and Teju Cole among the figures that inform his thinking.
That range of references points to the breadth of Abad’s practice, which is as attentive to writing and drawing as it is to installation. It also helps explain why his work feels so alert to the tension between beauty and violence, seduction and evidence.
Abad is currently featured in “In Minor Keys” at the 61st Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy, through November 22. The podcast offers a fuller view of an artist whose work insists that memory is not passive recollection, but an active, contested form of making.
