Asia
Pio Abad
A Thoughtful Gift
2019
A Thoughtful Gift, 2019
A Thoughtful Gift is based on 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 USA, engraved 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 USA 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.
In his artistic practice, Pio Abad considers the social and political significance of objects usually consigned to the sidelines of history. Abad uses different media such as textile, drawing, installation, and photography; employing strategies of appropriation to extract alternative readings and repressed historical events. Abad’s work weaves together threads of complicity between events, ideologies, and people. His work glides seamlessly between these histories, enacting quasi-fictional combinations with their leftovers. By juxtaposing disparate items within a cohesive visual framework, Abad encourages viewers to question the relationships between personal and collective histories, the mundane and the monumental, and the visible and the hidden.