Pacita Abad Opening Day: Victoria Sung in conversation with Pio Abad and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa

In celebration of the opening of the exhibition Pacita Abad, the Walker staged two panel discussions that explore the artist’s complex relationships to her diasporic identity and exuberant material practice.
This second of two panels examines how Abad’s cosmopolitan persona and art practice intimately entwined to complicate easy categories of craft, geography, and time.
BIOS
Pio Abad is an artist whose work is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. He mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies, and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation’s story. Abad has exhibited at the 58th Carnegie International; the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial; Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kadist, San Francsico; the 2nd Honolulu Biennial; 12th Gwangju Biennial; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney; and Gasworks, London. Abad is also curator of the Pacita Abad Art Estate and has recently co-curated solo exhibitions on the artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Manila; Spike Island, Bristol; and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai.
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa is interested in the role of the curator as storyteller. He explores narratives by engaging with artists and thinkers, often creating spaces of temporal frictions in which the act of recollection becomes a vector for imagined futures. Mustafa is senior curator at the Singapore Art Museum and National Gallery Singapore, where he builds links between the art of Southeast Asia and the world.
Victoria Sung is the Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she works with artists to create exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Previously, she was associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center. Recent projects include solo exhibitions of new work by Pao Houa Her, Shen Xin, Candice Lin, Rayyane Tabet, and Laure Prouvost, as well as large-scale survey exhibitions, including Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall (2019) and Siah Armajani: Follow This Line (2018). Her final project at the Walker is Pacita Abad, the Filipina American artist’s first retrospective, which will travel to San Francisco, New York City, and Toronto after its presentation in Minneapolis.