Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Opening hours: Tue–Sun, 10am–6pm; Thu, 10am–9pm
Opening: Tuesday, July 15, 2025, 7pm–10pm
Today
Tanya Lukin Linklater: _structural_flex_
Lecture, 8 July 2025, 19:00
Ongoing
Summer Semester 2025
Information, 22 April – 25 July 2025
Upcoming
Overture – Graduate Exhibition
Exhibition, 15 July – 10 August 2025, 19:00
Florence Jung: Doing nothing?
Lecture, 24 June 2025, 19:00
Rabih Mroué: Shot/Counter Shot. Rethinking the Reverse
Lecture, 17 June 2025, 19:00
Adir Jan & Emrah Gökmen: On the Shores of the Munzur, on the Shores of the Murat
Concert, 12 June 2025, 20:00
Miloš Trakilović: Love Songs & War Machines
Lecture, 10 June 2025, 19:00
Anna Roberta Goetz: 36. Bienal de São Paulo. Not All Travellers Walk Roads / Of Humanity as Practice
Lecture, 3 June 2025, 19:00
Jimmy Robert
Lecture, 27 May 2025, 19:00
Klein: No Degree, No Budget, No Problem
Lecture (20.5.) Concert (21.5.), 20 – 21 May 2025
Julian Irlinger: Reanimation and Reconstruction
Lecture, 13 May 2025, 19:00
İmran Ayata & Bülent Kullukçu: Songs of Gastarbeiter
Music Lecture, 8 May 2025, 19:00
Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien: Langit Lupa (Heaven Earth)
Screening (5.5.) Lecture (6.5.), 5 – 6 May 2025, 19:00
Helen Marten: Animal Hours
Lecture, 29 April 2025, 19:00
Application: Master of Arts Program in CURATORIAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Application, 10 April – 31 May 2025
Semester Break Spring 2025
Information, 14 February – 21 April 2025
Water Cooler Talks 2025
Event, 8 – 9 February 2025
Rundgang 2025
Exhibition, 7 – 9 February 2025, 10:00–20:00
Trisha Donnelly
Lecture, 30 January 2025, 19:00
Kerstin Brätsch: Parasite Painting
Lecture, 28 January 2025, 19:00
Emma Enderby: Curating in and out of Place
Lecture, 14 January 2025, 19:00

Pio Abad: To Those Sitting in Darkness
In this lecture, Pio Abad will discuss his current exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, ‘To Those Sitting in Darkness.’ The title is a reference to the essay ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’, Mark Twain’s diatribe against imperialism, particularly the US conquest of the Philippines. The exhibition stages encounters between artefacts selected from Oxford University’s extensive collection, works drawn from the artist’s community and artworks he created in response to personages and narratives embedded within museum objects.
Abad sees the exhibition as an act of illumination that puts unexamined histories on display and provides a different kind of legibility to objects that have been confined to the margins of telling. It is also a memoir, formed within the cracks of grand narratives and taxonomical erasures. Historical artefacts becoming part of an inventory of the self, refracted through the diasporic entanglements of things and the many afterlives of empire.
Pio Abad (b.1983) is an artist whose work is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work 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.
He has exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 13th Taipei Biennial; 58th Carnegie International; 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennial; Ateneo Art Gallery, Manila; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Kadist, San Fransisco; 2nd Honolulu Biennial; 12th Gwangju Biennial; 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney and Gasworks, London. Abad’s works are part of a number of important collections including Tate, UK; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hawai’i State Art Museum, Honolulu and Singapore Art Museum.
The lecture will be held in English.