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
The objects included old master paintings, some of which were fake, a huge collection of regency period silverware and a vast amount of jewellery.
Pio has recreated many of them, sometimes using cheap reproduction techniques, and others creating immaculate reproductions with his partner and collaborator, the jewellery maker Francis Wadsworth Jones.
For instance, he recreated the propagandistic and myth-making, not to mention kitsch as hell, paintings and sculpture that represent the Marcoses as Malaccas and Maganda, the Adam and Eve of the Philippines' origin story.
Their collections of silver and of old master paintings, meanwhile, have been converted by P.O.
from auction catalogue reproductions into photographic prints on shelves and postcards on display cases which could be picked up and explored by audiences.
Among the most dramatic reinterpretations of objects as part of this wider work has been a series exploring the jewellery collection.
After the People Power Revolution, the Marcosses fled to Hawaii where 413 jewels packed among disposable nappies were confiscated by United States Customs.
Collectively, the jewels became known as the Hawaii Collection, which was repatriated to the Philippines and expected to be sold at auction, only to be held up for decades by legal challenges from the Marcoses.
But in 2016, the right-wing president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, put a stop to these plans.
The images of the jewellery taken by the auction house Christie's were used by Pio and Francis to create 3D models.
In one installation in which the models have been employed, reproductions of the jewels created in white plastic, which lends them a spectral quality, are accompanied by notes which reflect the effects of kleptocracy in public services such as health and energy.
For instance, one text tells us that a Belle Epoque diamond and platinum tiara by Cartier is the equivalent of the treatment of 12,052 cases of tuberculosis until their full recovery.
The fascination with collections and their freighted histories has prompted several pieces by Pio beyond the Marcos's and Philippine history.
In the COVID pandemic, Pio read Dan Hicks' book The Brutish Museums,
and realized that his home, in what used to be the grand stores of the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich in London, was the staging post for the British Army's punitive expedition to the Kingdom of Benin in February 1897.
That ended with the looting of the Benin sculptures that are now in various museums around the world.
Pio made a series of exquisitely detailed drawings in which he depicted Benin sculptures from the British Museum alongside apparently humdrum objects in his home.
that also had histories relating to extraction, plunder and violence from kitchen ingredients to plants.
Indeed, drawing has been an increasingly powerful tool for Pio both as a means of expression and as a metaphor for the forensic nature of his practice.
The drawing, called I'm Singing a Song That Can Only Be Born After Losing a Country, from 2023, was made after Pio was invited to reflect on the collections of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and other public holdings in the city.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,919 · page 54 of 96
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