MVS Proseminar Artist Talk: Pio Abad

Pio Abad (b.1983) is an artist whose work is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counter-narratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation’s story. 

He has exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 58th Carnegie International; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial; Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kadist, San Francisco; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; the 2nd Honolulu Biennial; 12th Gwangju Biennial; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Gasworks, London. He was recently nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize. 

Abad’s works are part of a number of important collections including Tate, UK; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu and Singapore Art Museum. 

Abad is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad. He has recently co-curated monographic exhibitions on Pacita Abad at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila and Spike Island, Bristol. Pacita Abad is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. 

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