Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Abad.
Before I continue, look out for a video version of this interview on the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects.
Pio Abad explores objects and images that have personal resonance and political potency.
His primary medium is installations comprising multiple materials, and within them are various forms and methods, from fine pen drawings and textiles to photography and text.
The foundation of his work is an engagement with the history and present of his homeland, the Philippines, where he was born in 1983 and where his parents were involved in the struggle against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s.
The conditions of that brutal regime, its propaganda and visual excess, the international power structures of which it was part and its legacies today have been fundamental to Pio's practice.
In recent years, he's expanded his work to explore broader themes relating to collections of art and artifacts and the histories of violence, theft and exploitation that underpin them.
As we'll hear, Pio's early life was deeply marked by his parents' activism.
Ferdinand Marcos was the 10th president of the Philippines and ruled from 1965 with a period of martial law after 1972 until he was deposed by the so-called People Power Revolution in 1986.
Pio's parents were central figures in that struggle.
During his authoritarian rule, Marcus was famous for his marriage to his wife Imelda, who became a symbol of the couple's excess and kleptocracy, or stealing national resources for personal gain.
This is among Pio's central subjects.
Although he first studied at the University of the Philippines in Manila, he eventually moved to the UK and he lives in London today.
He began his studies in the UK at the Glasgow School of Art,
and then did a Masters at the Royal Academy Schools alongside a particularly energetic and ambitious cohort of students who included, among others, Prem Sahib and Eddie Peake.
I first interviewed Pio in his final year at the Academy and was struck then by the clarity of his inquiry and the spare, precise and resonant nature of his approach.
He'd then embarked on what would become a 12-year opus called The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders, which analyzed the multiple ways in which the Marcoses exploited culture to gild their brutal regime.
Jane Ryan and William Saunders were the false identities that the presidential couple used to register their account with the Swiss bank in 1968.
With this, alongside other accounts, they stole $10 billion from the Philippine treasury for their own private wealth.
Over the course of this research project, Pio explored different forms of objects that the Marcoses collected, commissioned and used to promote what Pio's described as the absurd post-colonial ideology they enforced under the auspices of capitalist democracies during the Cold War.
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