For Pio Abad, drawing becomes a method to engage with looted objects and excavate suppressed histories. His works function as both traces of and memorials to the cultural loss wrought by colonial and imperial violence in his native Philippines and around the world.
Each in the series of ink drawings 1897.76.36.18.6 (2023-2026) juxtaposes one of the Benin bronzes (from the British Museum’s collection) with a similarly sized stack of objects sourced from the artist’s domestic surroundings, re-enchanting the looted objects by re-situating them within a matrix of everyday life. I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023) is a to-scale drawing of the so-called Powhatan’s Mantle held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, focusing on its underside to produce both a transcription of the object itself and a lament for the histories of genocide and dispossession it holds.
Banua (2026) engages with a women’s top constructed from mother-of-pearl buttons, in the collection of Chicago’s Field Museum, which holds many artefacts from the Philippines. Abad’s abstraction feels cosmological and archipelagic, establishing kinship across centuries through the shared conditions of craft. Mimetical and indexical, Abad’s works invite intimate encounter, drawing artefacts out of vaults and display cases and imbuing them with renewed presence.
—Murtaza Vali
