Pio Abad (b. 1983, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in London, England) examines the personal and political entanglements of and within objects. Through a wide-ranging practice encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation, and text, Abad mines repressed historical events and offers counternarratives to draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies, and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, his work emanates from a personal family chronicle woven into the nation’s story. His exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford was nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize and was exhibited at Tate Britain for the 2024 Turner Prize Exhibition.

Abad’s solo exhibitions include Fear of Freedom Makes Us See Ghosts, Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila (2022); Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, Kadist, San Francisco (2019); Splendour, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2019); Notes on Decomposition, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2016); 1975 – 2015, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Some Are Smarter Than Others, Gasworks, London (2014). Recent group exhibition include In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial, Kerala (2022); Is it morning for you yet?, The 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Things Entangling, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2020); Phantom Limb, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019); To Make Wrong/Right/Now, 2nd Honolulu Biennial, Hawaii (2019); Imagined Nations/ Modern Utopias, 12th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2018). Forthcoming exhibitions include: Small World, 13th Taipei Biennial (2023) and Pio Abad: To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in February 2024. His artworks are held in collections around the world including Tate, UK; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu; Singapore Art Museum; Kadist, Paris/San Francisco and Art Jameel, Dubai.

He is also the curator of the estate of his aunt, the Filipino American artist Pacita Abad. He has recently co-curated monographic exhibitions on Pacita Abad at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila and Spike Island, Bristol. He also co-edited the publication Pacita Abad: A Million Things to Say in 2021.