Variable dimensions
Comprising two sculptures, one photograph and one video, the installation Malakas & Maganda (1986 – 2016) questions the mythological iconography of the Filipino conjugal dictators Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and thus addresses the construction of propaganda representation and the role of art facing current events. The work is organized around the leftovers of a copy of a monumental sculpture of Imelda Marcos, which the artist had commissioned and whose remains were stored in his studio. Several included elements show how this body of work has evolved over time and in reaction to political events in the Philippines. The video footage, for example, was taken inside KADIST exhibition “Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs” with the Museum of Contemporary and Design in Manila in 2016, when the artist requested that his own piece (i.e. copied paintings representing the dictator) be repainted in black to protest against the revisionist funeral organized by current president Duterte. The installation was later presented for the first time as an ensemble at KADIST Paris for the exhibition “Conceal, cover with sand, replicate, translate, restore” in 2017.
In his practice, Pio Abad looks into 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, and employs strategies of appropriation to extract alternative readings and repressed historical events. Abad ties threads of complicity between events, ideologies and people. His artworks glide seamlessly between these histories, enacting quasi-fictional combinations with their leftovers and weaving together threads of complicity between events, ideologies, and people. Abad was artist-in-residence at KADIST San Francisco from April to June 2019, where he conducted research into narratives of exile and displacement from the 1970s and 80s that brought Filipinos to California.
Dutch Emerging: Ruben Janssen X GRA Fashion Bachelor 2023 – A Shaded View on Fashion From the back to the middle and around again — Ria’s wedding dress, Alan’s patterns and John’s model: ‘My project is an investigation into evolution, explored through prisms of biology, computation and a poetic personal narrative, shifting between timescales on an evolutionary timeline...
At the halfway point along South Africa’s Highway N1, running from Cape Town to Johannesburg, sits the small town of Beaufort West...
Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney...
BIPAM 2021: Delight, despair, dialogue and the despot | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Viewpoints September 17, 2021 By Nabilah Said (1,800 words, 6-minute read) I’ve never actually attended the Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM)...
Installation art by Şakir Gökçebağ - The re:art Installation art by Şakir Gökçebağ The art of Şakir Gökçebağ plays with one’s perception of normality and challenges any prior convention or knowledge of how things were designed to function and how they exist in the order and logic of the everyday man-made world...
Natura Negra , which translates to “Black Nature”, is a black-and-white photographic series by Chanell Stone that explores the connection between the Black body and nature within man-made environments...
Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures...
In SEA STATE 6 Charles Lim takes the viewer down the Jurong Rock Caverns in Singapore, a massive underground infrastructure for oil and fuel storage, built to support the commercial operations of oil traders, petrochemical ventures and manufacturing industries in the area...
The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo ...
Flag (Thames) 2016 depicts a small section of the Thames River—one that is adjacent to the Palace of Westminster in London—as an algorithmic representation on an LED panel...
Solid are the Winds: Aeolian Encounters at The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial (Part I) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Natasha Harth for QAGOMA untitled (giran) (2018), Jonathan Jones in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM January 10, 2019 By Marcus Yee (1259 words, five-minute read) This is the first of a two-part essay on the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial running at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia, from 24 November 2018 to 28 April 2019...