Pio Abad

When I first got the news, I was in the US and got [a call from] an unknown number, so I just assumed it was a robo-call trying to sell me a new mobile phone contract, but it was the director of Tate Britain, Alex Farquharson with the good news.
To Those Sitting in Darkness is a show I’m really proud of and I’m glad it’s the one that’s being recognised for the Turner since it is in conversation with histories in the UK while also honouring narratives of the Philippines. It brings together all these narrative strands that I’ve been invested in for a very long time, while pointing to different trajectories for the practice and for me as an artist in general.
I’m super thrilled to be amongst a great group of nominees all dealing with histories of family and politics and doing it in visually generous ways. So, I’m excited about the nomination but I’m more excited about what will essentially be a group exhibition with three artists I really admire.

I’ve used this a couple times, but there’s a really good John le Carré quote: ‘I had the great fortune of being born with a subject matter’. I always think about that in relation to my family’s story and the role they play in the art I make. Ultimately, I see my role as an artist as one of a storyteller. I begin that storytelling from a personal standpoint and then expand to larger histories, but always retain a very firm footing on where I’ve come from and the struggles that have shaped me.
My parents met in their early twenties working as trade union organisers. At the time it was already a few years into the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship, where organising and activism was a very risky proposition because critics of the regime were either imprisoned, tortured or worse. Thinking about the courage it took and their clarity of purpose to take on this role in their early twenties still really blows my mind. I think I carry that clarity with me as an artist. I’m under no illusion that my art is politics or economics. I make stuff that people can look at and learn from but my parents helped clarify the limits and possibilities of being an artist. The sense of using art to speak truth to power or to hold institutions to account is definitely there, but it’s still shown in galleries and museums in a structure through which art can be accessed.

For a while I was in denial that being an artist was something you could do but, going back to family, there were two strands that influenced my decision to pursue art as a life choice. One strand was my parents, and the other was my aunt, Pacita Abad. She was a very prolific artist during her lifetime and seeing an artist in the family do that expands your sense of possibility. I started my BA in Manila, but then at some point my aunt told me if you want to pursue this seriously, you better get the fuck out the country, because that’s what she did! She travelled the world and inhaled all these cultures that shaped how she viewed her life and her work. She was the one that helped me look for art schools in the UK.
As a twenty-one year old getting itchy feet, the prospect of moving from Manila to Glasgow, which is a completely opposite place, was a very exciting proposition. It's quite bittersweet now thinking about it because it was a photo of the Glasgow School of Art building, that has since burned down twice, in a Glasgow tourist handbook that made me decide it was the place for me. It’s the best decision I ever made, really. I met my wife there and it was an incredible time for the city. It was 2004 — 2009, before the crash, there was still funding for the arts and the now mythical Glasgow DIY culture was at its cultural height. It’s very rare to go to a new city and find yourself at the centre of something almost immediately. One of the first shows I saw was at Mary Mary gallery showing artists in a bedroom just off Sauchiehall Street. A few years later one of those artists, Karla Black, was nominated for the Turner prize. There was a real sense of possibility, of being somewhere where you felt like things were happening.

I think so. I’ve been lucky enough to find communities in all the different places. In Glasgow it was the art school and in London my sense of tenure really came from Gasworks offering me a show in 2014. They gave me a studio and a sense of community in a city that can feel really overwhelming. It was a community that was international and sometimes transient, but we all shared these concerns about having London as a base but looking at histories elsewhere. London has always been a base but my practice has been very international, so people are often quite surprised to hear I live in London. My work is defined by this strange dance between rootedness and itineracy. Having just had our first child, I think rootedness will define the next few years.

Archival research has always been the starting point of how I think and work. Over the past couple of years I have been able to access different archives that have shaped my work. Whether its Andrew Carnegie’s archives in Pittsburgh for Carnegie International or leafing through Margaret Thatcher’s personal affects at the Reagan archives in California. I’ve always wanted the opportunity to work in the archives of an encyclopaedic museum and wondered how I would navigate these institutions that narrate civilisation as we know it. When I was invited by Ashmolean NOW curator, Lena Fritsch, to do this show, the prospect of being able to access the archives at The Ashmolean and University of Oxford, was really daunting but also something I’ve always wanted to do. I love material culture and objects that have been shaped by time, but at the same time, where do you start when you have access to the entire archival collections of Oxford University?
My understanding of history always begins from my own experiences, so the idea of starting with Filipino history was very clear from the beginning. After I started, one artefact led me to the next and I could constellate a larger narrative that was still incredibly personal. The exhibition became a way of weaving together a community of people I’ve worked with in the past and people whose advocacies and practices I’ve always been drawn to. There’s the Carlos Villa photograph, the textiles from the Sinagtala weavers, the collaboration with my wife Frances, as well as the ongoing discussions with different local collections in Oxford. So, it became not just an act of exhibition making, but also quite a genuine act of community building. There’s a tenderness there that my practice hinted at in the past, but with this particular show there’s a more personal approach to history telling that helps to understand how these expansive histories are ergonomic to the present.

The goal has always been how to make the archive more seductive. These acts of reinscription, translation or reconstruction in the show create encounters between historical and contemporary materials. These encounters are various acts of seduction to entice people to look at the archive. The way I’ve described my process is almost like memoir writing but through other people’s stuff. How do you navigate yourself through an etching from the 17th century and a pearl tiara that used to be owned by the Romanov family? It’s far reaching but incredibly intimate in the same way that a memoir can only ever be a very singular point of view but also includes so many different people and collaborations.

Yes and it’s also partly about me resisting being typecast. Often, the moment you make work about the place you’re from, the work starts becoming only ever about that. I was conscious about not wanting people to see the exhibition as an artist creating a history of the Philippines. That’s definitely there, because I’m rooted in that narrative, but I’m resisting it being just an interpretation of Filipino history. I think the art world has a tendency to pigeonhole artists to where they’re from without being able to see these histories as part of a larger network of narratives of colonialism, migration, diaspora, or even just shared experiences of conquest and grief. You get stuck in your own specificity. The way I navigated the show was a way of resisting that, while also being aware of the limitations of my own point of view.

It became a call and response thing. For instance, I’ve known the existence of this print of Prince Giolo which is actually an advertisement for a Filipino being shown around pubs in London as a curiosity, so that was the starting point of the entire process. From that, I thought it would be great in conversation with the Carlos Villa portrait because both deal with tattooing as a form of identifying. For Giolo, his tattoos made him a curiosity, whereas for Carlos Villa tattooing was an act of solidarity with other pacific islander cultures. The way I explain it is like travelling through an archipelago and you keep finding things. I was never really sure how everything would connect with each other until I was putting the exhibition together. It was a very intuitive process.
The last piece — in a way it was the first and last because it brings everything together — was the red drawing of the underside of Powhatan’s Mantel. When I was doing site visits for the show I’d always see that object, and towards the end it made sense to bring it into the exhibition. Initially I tried just literally moving it to the next room but it’s so fragile that they would never allow it. So instead, I reimagined it as a map, not of any particular place but of all of these lost places. It opens with this cartography, which links to the idea of mapping, tattooing and drawing, which the exhibition came to be about.

Sam Thorne when he was writing the reasons for my nomination described the exhibition as acts of incision and inscription (writing and cutting). Within that there’s the dynamic between needing to record but also the violence in recording that I really loved. It’s very heartening to read things about something you’ve been thinking about for so long. That’s what I hope — as much as there’s these specific stories in the work, there’s always the opportunity for the audience to see themselves in it. In fact, the day after the opening, it was a family day at the Ashmolean, there was a dad explaining the exhibition to his son and the way he was explaining it was really beautiful. It’s exactly what you hope your work can do, to reach out to the broadest possible demographic whether it’s a Turner prize judge or a five-year-old kid.