There are drawings that ask to be looked at from a distance, and there are drawings that insist you come closer. For the better part of five months, Filipino artist Pio Abad had been working on both kinds, spending his days tracing histories with a pen measuring only 0.3 millimeters wide. Every stitch, knot, crack, and button was rendered by hand, with some of the works growing monumental in scale, stretching nearly two meters tall.
This year, those drawings arrive at the Venice Biennale 2026 as part of In Minor Keys, the exhibition conceived by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. For Abad, the invitation felt like an extension of conversations he has been having for years; about exile, inheritance, museums, and the ways societies hold onto history.
“I’ve always considered drawing as the foundation of my practice,” he says. “It’s the way I understand objects. It’s the way I map out history. But it’s also the most intimate thing I do in the studio.”
The title of the exhibition actually became an immediate point of entry for the artist. Drawing, as Abad suggests, carries a certain modesty. It does not announce itself in the same way sculpture or installation might, but in his hands, it becomes both microscopic and immense. “What could be more minor than drawing?” he asks. “But in some ways, for me, it’s also quite a monumental process, because it’s me mapping the world with a pen that is barely a millimeter.”
The presentation in Venice is a culmination of works made over the past four years, including I’m Singing a Song That Can Only Be Born After Losing a Country, a sprawling red drawing first shown at the Ashmolean Museum in 2024, and Banua, a monumental canvas that marks the first time Abad has translated his drawing practice onto fabric instead of paper. Another work, 1897.76.36.18.6, continues an ongoing series reflecting on the looting of the Benin Bronzes and the uneasy afterlives of objects displaced by empires.
But Abad insists that the titles themselves feel itinerant, moving between geographies and meanings. Banua or Banwa is a word that shifts depending on where it is spoken. “It’s a word that appears a lot in Austronesian diasporic cultures,” he says. “You know, in Batanes, Banua means harbor, but then in Pampanga, which is where my mom’s from, it means celestial space, or even time. And so I love that there is one word that is fundamentally itinerant, and it changes meaning as it travels, yet its essence remains the same.”
It’s that movement between homeland and diaspora that runs through much of Abad’s work. Born in the Philippines and now based in London, he has spent years examining how power is embedded into objects: jewelry once owned by the Marcos family, colonial artifacts displayed behind museum glass, and domestic items that absorb personal histories. His drawings often begin with close observation before unfolding into something larger and harder to locate. A detail from a Bagobo garment, for instance, becomes an archipelago. Mother-of-pearl buttons tied together with string begin resembling constellations or landmasses seen from above.
“I think my work always invites you to zoom into objects,” Abad explains. “And then as you spend more time in that zoomed-in place, you kind of zoom out and the works start resembling other things, whether it’s land masses or archipelagos or the night sky.”
Venice, with its canals and its own histories of migration and empire, became an unexpected echo of those concerns. Abad speaks about seeing the works installed there and suddenly recognizing fragments of the city’s topography inside the drawings themselves, with bridges connecting floating bodies, or islands tethered together by thread. But unlike earlier works explicitly tied to Philippine political history, the pieces in In Minor Keys widen their scope outward. “The usual political families aren’t involved, which is nice,” he jokes, yet still, the political remains embedded beneath the surface.
“The foundations of my work will always be my experiences growing up in the Philippines, but at present, it’s really been more about looking at that history in the context of larger histories.”
In Venice, where national pavilions often dominate the conversation, Abad seems less interested in representation as a fixed identity than in the temporary communities that gather around art. This year also marks a personal threshold: he has now spent more of his life living in the United Kingdom than in the Philippines. The fact complicates his understanding of home, even if it does not diminish where he comes from.
“I go in there as a Philippine artist,” he says. “But Venice gets so invested in ideas of nation. For me, what Venice can really stand for is less this idea of nation, but actually this idea of community.”
Perhaps that is what lingers most in Abad’s drawings. Not simply the histories they depict, but the sense that history itself is relational, held together by fragile threads between people, objects, and places that continue to move long after borders have been drawn around them.
—Gab Yap
