Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

10 February - 8 September 2024

To Those Sitting in Darkness features new drawings and objects by London-based artist Pio Abad.

Deeply informed by the history of the world and particularly the Philippines, where Abad was born and raised, his works draw out transnational lines between historical incidents and people, and our lives today. Concerned with colonial history and cultural loss, 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.

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 institutions’ collections and archives, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, St John’s College and Blenheim Palace.

A major piece is the large-sized drawing ‘I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country’ (2023), based on one of the most important objects in the Ashmolean’s founding collection: ‘Powhatan’s mantle’ (c.1600–1628), a monumental deer-hide hanging with precise shell beadwork ornaments dates to the early 1600s and the first period of contact between Indigenous North American peoples and British colonists. The mantle is named for Wahunsenacawh (c.1550–1618), the chief of the Powhatan people, and also known as the father of Pocahontas.

Using high-resolution photographic scans of the object, Abad has drawn the underside of the mantle to scale. He describes the imaginary map-like work as ‘an atlas for many lands that can never be recovered,’ as a reminder of the erasure of the Native American people that followed the arrival of the British in Wahunsenacawh’s land. Abad links this to the Indian Wars of the 1870s and then to the Philippine-American War, which began in the late 1890s.

Abad was also inspired by a drawing uncovered in the collections at St John’s College of Prince Giolo, a tattooed Filipino slave who was brought to Oxford in the 1680s and exhibited as an exotic curiosity in pubs and other venues. In ‘Giolo’s Lament,’ Abad re-renders Giolo’s tattooed hand through eleven engravings on marble arranged on the gallery’s walls, a moving reminder of his fragile humanity.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum, Abad encountered traditional kris swords from Mindanao (the southern region of the Philippines). The double-edged blades incised with mythic symbols and handles made of precious wood and bone carved in crocodile or bird-like forms were originally owned by Indigenous tribes known as the Moro people, who adapted Islam into their belief system.

These kris swords represent a resistance to colonial rule and conversion to Christianity and speak to historical accounts of dispossession. A selection of these weapons have been resurrected from museum storage for the first time since their accession to be displayed in this exhibition.