K-varieties and Galois representations

In a remarkable article Ribet showed how to attach rational $2$-dimensional representations to elliptic ${\mathbb Q}$-curves. An abelian variety $A$ is a (weak) $K$-variety if it is isogenous to all of its $\text{Gal}_K$-conjugates. In this article we study the problem of attaching an absolutely irreducible $\ell$-adic representation of $\text{Gal}_K$ to an abelian $K$-variety, which sometimes has smaller dimension than expected. When possible, we also construct a Galois-equivariant pairing, which restricts the image of this representation. As an application of our construction, we prove modularity of abelian surfaces over ${\mathbb Q}$ with potential quaternionic multiplication.