Entangled Modernities
Pio Abad, Tate Etc.
January 2021
Pacita Abad (1946–2004) first visited the African continent in 1979. Accompanying her husband, a development economist, on a series of aid missions, she travelled to Kenya, Sudan, South Sudan and the Congolese border. It was during a four-month stay with fellow Filipinos, working with UNICEF in the town of Wau in South Sudan, that Abad started developing her paintings based on tribal masks and figures – using relief sacks primed with flour and water as her canvases after exhausting the materials that she had brought with her. […]