Artist Pio Abad's exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum shortlisted for 2024 Turner Prize

The Ashmolean is delighted to announce that Pio Abad (b.1983) has been shortlisted for the 2024 Turner Prize for his Ashmolean exhibition, To Those Sitting in Darkness.

The exhibition, which opened in February and runs to 8 September 2024, is part of Ashmolean NOW, a series representing early to mid-career artists based in the UK. To Those Sitting in Darkness is a visual conversation featuring profound, challenging and original works.

Abad’s art concerns colonial history and cultural loss and is deeply informed by world history, with a particular focus on the Philippines, where he was born and raised. His parents campaigned for justice during a time of conflict and corruption under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, and it is the need to remember this history that has shaped the foundations of his work.

Now based in London, Abad’s poetic, personal and political art offers a powerful critique of the way many museums collect, display and interpret the objects they hold, and questions prevailing perceptions and perspectives.

Abad created a wide-ranging body of work for To Those Sitting in Darkness encompassing drawing, sculpture and text. The title is a reference to American writer Mark Twain’s satire ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ (1901), which strongly criticised imperialism. 

The exhibition explores, identifies and illuminates objects Abad found in the rich and varied collections of the University of Oxford; his focus on those where their histories have been marginalised, unexplained, ignored or forgotten. His intricately detailed creations are displayed together with other artists’ work alongside ‘diasporic’ objects researched and chosen by Abad from a range of Oxford collections and archives, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College and Blenheim Palace.

Pio Abad says: ‘I am beyond thrilled to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize. I share this honour with my community of makers, custodians and storytellers who made this exhibition possible: curator Lena Fritsch, my wife and collaborator Frances, the artist Carlos Villa and his family, and Jamela Alindogan and the Sinagtala weavers. My exhibition endeavours to illuminate struggles and stories that have been kept in the dark for too long, and I am delighted that this nomination can shine an even brighter light on them.’

Ashmolean NOW is curated by Dr Lena Fritsch, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Ashmolean. She says: 'Where many of us who work in or visit museums think of them as spaces of preservation, communication and inclusion, Pio Abad makes the case for them as places of loss, silence and exclusion. His visually alluring and thought-provoking work underlines how art is the ideal medium to rediscover, debate and liberate ‘diasporic’ objects and give them a new cultural platform, memory and voice. I’m truly delighted that Pio has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize with our exhibition.’

Dr Xa Sturgis, Director of the Ashmolean Museum, says: ‘I am thrilled that Pio has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize for his exhibition in our Ashmolean NOW series which encourages contemporary artists to engage with our collections and our history. Pio’s multi-layered works repay all the looking and thinking that their meticulous and engaging nature encourages us to give them.'

Pio Abad will be ‘In Conversation’ with Anthony Gardner, Professor of Contemporary Art History, Ruskin School of Art at the Ashmolean on Wed 1 May, 2024 to discuss To Those Sitting in Darkness, his artistic practise and interest in the historic collections he encountered in Oxford.