Pio Abad’s art listed for Turner prize
LONDON — It’s not often that we encounter works of art by kababayans in our visits to museums abroad so when we came upon Pio Abad’s work at Tate Britain, we were thrilled; even more so when we realized that he was one of four finalists for the prestigious Turner Prize, commended by jurors for his “precision and elegance with which he combines research and new artistic work to ask questions of museums and bring history to the present with sensitivity and clarity.”
The Turner, presented to British visual artists or artists based in Britain, was established in 1984 and has become the UK’s most publicized art award, fueling debate on new developments in contemporary art and courting controversy through works like Damien Hirst’s 1991 shark in a formaldehyde tank and Tracey Emin’s 1998 disheveled bed—much like the time when J.M.W. Turner, after whom the prize is named, also disrupted the status quo in the 1800s with his new approach to landscape painting that changed the course of art history, as many Turner Prize winners aspire to do to this day.
This year, Abad, together with his co-finalists Claudette Johnson, Delaine Le Bas and Jasleen Kaur, all coincidentally reflected on personal and socio-political histories and how they continue to resonate in our lives.
Abad tackles cultural loss and colonial histories, often ruminating on his upbringing in the Philippines where he was born in 1983 to parents Butch and Dina Abad, whose roles as activists in the fight for social justice inform his works. His aunt, the late artist Pacita Abad, whose estate he curates, encouraged him to study art abroad, landing him in Glasgow in 2004 and the Royal Academy in 2009. Solo shows followed in London and Manila where he had exhibits at Silverlens in 2013 and 2017 and one at Ateneo Art Gallery in 2022, aside from shows in San Francisco and Ontario in 2019.
“To Those Sitting in Darkness” recreates Abad’s exhibit at the Ashmolean Museum where he was invited to respond to the collections of Oxford institutions. The title references Mark Twain’s satirical essay, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which exposed American imperialism in The Philippine-American War.
The sheer volume of objects that he had access to was quite overwhelming as he spent a year perusing inventory, visiting archives and items in storage, talking to librarians, curators and conservators. He met the challenge by choosing the pieces that had unexamined histories— those sitting in the darkness, in other words. He realized that so much history has been marginalized, unexplained, ignored or forgotten and he had to bring them to light: “You get thousands of histories, but you navigate it—and I think that’s the reason I’m an artist because it’s the spaces in between these objects where making artwork, writing or drawing comes in; it’s the spaces between these things where art becomes possible.”
Presenting the objects as a critique on how museums collect, display and interpret their collections, his exhibit also recreates a museum gallery, with detailed captions on each piece.
“Giolo’s Lament” responds to a 1692 etching advertising Giolo, a tattooed prince from Mindanao who was displayed as a curiosity in London pubs after he was captured by the English pirate William Dampier in 1687 who first landed in Abad’s home province of Batanes. Giolo was further dehumanized when, after dying of smallpox, a fragment of his skin was displayed at the Anatomy College in the Bodleian Library. He was later interred in an unmarked grave. It’s one of the earliest depictions of a trafficked Filipino body—a narrative of exploitation that continues to this day. Imagining the prince as a grieving son after his mother died under captivity, Abad immortalizes him through engraved renderings of his hand on 11 tablets of marble “arranged on the wall like a musical score, a spectral limb grasping for something out of reach, perhaps a body lost at sea.” It’s a moving reminder of his vulnerability and fragile humanity.
Another victim is Pocahontas, the daughter of a Powhatan chief who gave a robe as a gift during the first contact of the Native American people with British colonialists who brought her back to England where she was paraded as a civilized savage. Abad imagined the creases of the robe as an atlas for the many stolen lands never recovered and recalled the 1870s Indian wars that served as training ground for Philippine conquest.
Pieces of 19th-century bladed weaponry from Mindanao are displayed against vivid fabrics by Sinagtala, a community of displaced female weavers, built on the ashes of the siege of Marawi in 2017 when the government bombed the city in a quest to capture a militant Islamic group. The jagged motifs represent the tremors that reverberated as they were weaving while bombs fell. The swords were taken during the Philippine-American war when US colonizers battled against the Moros, the Muslim population which has waged a secessionist struggle since the 16th century against a government that has inherited the denigrated depiction of Moros from their Spanish and American colonizers. These artefacts are part of a huge number of Philippine heritage pieces that have been exiled in Western museums.
In another section, a set of Abad’s ink drawings depict Benin bronzes which are measured and arranged next to objects in his home, “in a quest to find a non-empirical way of accounting for these stolen artefacts, tracing the narrative of dispossession according to personal and emotional dimensions.” This developed when he discovered that his flat was a site for the storage facility of the British army, from which it launched the punitive Benin expedition in retaliation for the killings of a British delegation to the kingdom. He began to see things in his flat “in terms of the language of plunder: Tropical plants trying to grow in a climate they’re not used to, ingredients in the kitchen that were products of painful histories of extraction, objects of personal significance that echo kidnapped artefacts carrying specific spiritual significance.” Home becomes the site where shared histories of loss can be contemplated.
Two stunning sculptures easily caught our attention: a bigger-than-life bracelet in concrete and a tiara in bronze, reimaginations of the pieces of Imelda Marcos that were taken on exile to Hawaii during the People’s Power Revolution—an acknowledgment that “we’re all drawn to shiny objects. This fascination is part of this larger interest in the role of seduction and its relationship to power. On one hand are these seductive, beautiful things—and these beautiful things might be vessels for painful stories.”
