Pio Abad: Counternarratives

Pio Abad returns to Silverlens, Manila with Counternarratives. In his second exhibition at the gallery, Abad continues his engagement with Philippine political history, specifically looking at the problematic cultural legacy of the Marcos dictatorship in light of recent attempts to rehabilitate this dark chapter in the nation’s history. In a new body of work, he reconfigures familiar narratives and excavates dismantled iconographies in an attempt to understand the seemingly breath taking pace at which this history has unraveled.

The title of the exhibition, Counternarratives, is taken from a collection of short stories and novellas by the American author John Keene that draws upon multiple accounts—memoirs, newspaper articles and speculative fiction—to offer new perspectives on the past and the present. Abad uses the same approach throughout the exhibition, translating stories from historical residue into images and objects that reflect on acts of mythmaking, monumentalising and forgetting.

The exhibition opens with Untitled (Malakas), a series of seven screen prints repeatedly depicting the defaced hillside bust of Ferdinand Marcos. The 30 metre concrete monument was erected in Benguet in 1980 as the centrepiece of a proposed Marcos Park in expropriated tribal land. The construction was said to have displaced the Ibaloi tribe who were forced to sell their land at outrageously low prices. After the Marcoses were forced out of office in 1986, the Ibaloi slaughtered a carabao and a pig and poured the animals’ blood into the bust in an exorcism ritual before filing a case to reclaim their land. While the case languished in the courts, the debate continued as to whether the bust should be removed or kept as a reminder of the atrocities committed during martial law. That decision was made when the bust was destroyed with dynamite by unnamed perpetrators in the early hours of December 29th 2002.