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.