Ateneo Art Gallery
19 April to 30 July 2022
Fear of freedom, of which its possessor is not necessarily aware, makes him see ghosts.
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
For the past decade, a significant part of Pio Abad’s artistic practice has focused on the remembrance of what has been forgotten and even expunged. This direction emanates from a family narrative woven into a nation’s story that began in the locality of this museum and the university.
Abad’s parents, Butch and Dina, met as student activists and community organizers, committed to the cause of the social democratic movement in the 1970s under the growing threat of the Marcos dictatorship. Their work as trade union organizers subjected them to strict surveillance and threats of arrest. In 1980, their release from incarceration in a military camp was negotiated by the Jesuits, led by then Ateneo president Fr. Jose A. Cruz, on the condition that they be placed under “campus arrest” for a year in the Ateneo de Manila University. The couple continued their advocacies as professionals in legal and development work while raising four children. Like his siblings, Abad’s childhood memories involve people and places associated with his parents’ commitment as lifelong activists and as advocates for justice and freedom.
Abad takes on the same critical voice in his art practice, drawing attention to the ostentatious lifestyle of the Marcoses. He transforms their tangible opulence into another form of materiality—as cast, printed, etched, and painted objects. These appropriations are carefully constructed based on factual evidence, photographs, auction catalogs, documents, and archival records.
This exhibition was deliberately set to begin weeks before the May 2022 national elections. It was not expected though that there would be a dire need for such a remembrance project to counter rampant revisions in our nation’s history. Abad provides a radical alternative to the narrative conventions. The very acts of painting, drawing, printing, and erasing are the artist’s way of prompting memory both as a form of knowledge and an agent of remembering, underscoring the relationship of the private to the public; the personal to the political.