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
It's based on the 17th century deer hide hanging with shell beadwork, known as Powhatan's Mantle.
That name relates to Wahunsenakal, the chief of the Powhatan people.
Pio described the finely detailed drawing, which resembles a map, as an atlas for many lands that can never be recovered.
It conjures associations not just with the destruction of Native American cultures, but wider forms of colonialism and settler barbarism.
And imperial violence is also the subject of Giolo's Lament, also from 2023, a work Pio and I discuss in depth.
For the Venice Biennale in 2026, meanwhile, Pio made Banua, which describes an item in another major institution, the Field Museum in Chicago.
This time, a woman's garment from the Philippines, made from hundreds of mother-of-pearl buttons.
Banua, a tight crop of the garment, relates to that earlier drawing of the Native American mantle, which hangs beside it in Venice, in suggesting other forms, this time not a map, but the teeming shapes beneath a microscope, or perhaps a distant celestial constellation.
it's rendered in minute detail representing several months labor and is exceptionally alluring as an image and it's this idea of producing beautiful things to express troubling content with which i began our conversation in an interview early on in his career pio expressed the idea that he was trying to convey a personal sense of disenchantment through an enjoyment of making so i asked him does that remain a key duality in his work today
You go there, don't you?
You literally say that you're interested in beauty.
In a way, the discourse around beauty was almost forbidden to artists for quite a long time in some ways.
But actually, you will say that you're interested in beauty and making beautiful things.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?
Because actually what you really do need is attention because a lot of the complexity of your work needs to unravel once people are there.
But you need to grab them first, right?
You've got to get their attention so that you can then unravel these deeper connections in the work and the complex histories that inform it.
It's interesting you made that point earlier on about the limitations of art as well as its possibilities.
Because you come from a family who have first-hand experience of activism changing a country's future.
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