Pio Abad’s artistic practice concerns the personal and political entanglements of objects. Encompassing drawings, paintings, textiles, sculpture and text, his installations surface alternative or repressed historical events and offer counter-narratives.

For the Turner Prize, Abad recreates his exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where he was invited to respond to the collections and archives of Oxford institutions. He presented the objects he found to critique the way museums collect, display and interpret. The title To Those Sitting in Darkness refers to the unshown museum artefacts sitting in the stores. Abad references a satirical essay by Mark Twain, ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ (1901), that criticised the United States’ conquest of the Philippines, where Abad was born and raised.

Museum objects take on new resonance when displayed alongside Abad’s own drawings, sculptures made in collaboration with his wife, Frances Wadsworth Jones, and works from the artist’s diasporic community. He says much of the thinking behind the exhibition was staging these encounters. It is a place where the past and the present, and history and family come together. He says, ‘a lot of the work happens in that space in between, where the viewer contemplates something that I have produced in response to an artifact that I have looked at.’

Abad has written captions for each object in the exhibition. These bring to light unexamined histories alongside the artist’s response. For Abad, these museum objects are ‘icons of loss, of personal grief, of colonial grief’, containing stories that we must continuously tell. He says, ‘I want the audiences to see how I think, but also, I want them to see themselves in the show.’