Photographed by Lloyd Ramos for the November 2024 Issue of Vogue Philippines
Photographed by Lloyd Ramos for the November 2024 Issue of Vogue Philippines
Pio Abad’s Turner Prize-nominated exhibition is the nexus of political and personal histories.
Standing in Pio Abad’s Tate Britain exhibition, To Those Sitting in Darkness, an etching of a tattooed man from 1692 in a glass vitrine haunts its viewers. An advertisement for the exoticized display of the trafficked Mindanaoan ‘Prince Giolo’ in London, it sells his tattooed body and potential sorcery as curiosities. Giolo, enslaved by an English pirate who first landed in present-day Batanes, eventually died of smallpox, and his tattooed skin extracted as a preserved investigative specimen at Oxford’s Anatomy School. This etching is one of the first records of a migrant, albeit trafficked Filipino body.
“The element of serendipity has always been important in my practice,” Pio Abad tells Vogue Philippines. First encountering Giolo’s image online, the artist embarked on a quest, unexpectedly mapping Giolo back to himself. “I still find it so bizarre… [going on] that journey through Batanes, where my family is from. Which makes you realize that you will inevitably find yourself in all of these stories, because we’re all trapped in this system of conquest and marginalization.”
As if a restitution of his scraped skin, a resurrection of Giolo’s being to flesh, Pio choreographs Giolo’s stretching, tattooed arm through engravings on 11 slabs of pink marble. Arranged on the wall like a musical score, “Giolo’s Lament” (2023) simultaneously animates, humanizes but also monumentalizes Giolo through a speculative remembering: a rewriting of his identity as more than a foreign specimen, but a forcibly displaced human reaching for solace and home.
On the gallery walls, Giolo meets the work of legendary Filipino American artist and educator Carlos Villa. “When I encountered Giolo, it became clear to me that I wanted to put [him] in conversation with ‘Tat2’ (1971),” reflects Pio. “There’s something about the [shared] language of mark-making. Tattooing is an ongoing tradition, not just in the Philippines but stretching all the way to the American Pacific Northwest. Villa’s approach to tattooing is not specific to a particular culture, but he’s created a shared visual language across the Pacific. Tattooing then becomes a way of building solidarity with other indigenous languages.”
He then takes us on a journey through artifacts he’s brought to light, his practice a serendipitous culmination of encounters between history and the personal. Giolo’s archive finds solace among other forgotten narratives in Abad’s exhibition—all emblems of imperial violence. First mounted in February at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum as a response to the museum’s collections, this exhibition earned Abad a nomination for the prestigious Turner Prize this year, becoming its first Filipino-born nominee. Alongside three other shortlisted U.K. contemporary artists, he restages this exhibition at Tate Britain. “There is something quietly radical about these stories occupying two of the most British institutions, literally placing these peripheral stories at the heart of empires of culture,” he shares.
Next to Giolo, we are confronted by a large-scale concrete sculpture lying in-state on a low plinth. We veer over it as if looking into a casket. “Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite” (2019) reimagines former first lady Imelda Marcos’ 30-carat bejeweled bracelet, a mere piece from the Hawaii Collection: Marcos’ multi-million jewelry hoard seized by US customs in 1986 during the dictatorial family’s ousting and choreographed escape to Hawaii. “We were playing with different ways of interpreting these jewels, playing with scale,” Pio says, “it’s for the bodies of people who carry the excesses of empire; we wanted that same sense of encountering a corpse.”
On an elevated pedestal adjacent rests identical bronze tiara sculptures. “For the Sphinx” (2023) is a Russian diamond and pearl tiara in the Marcos’ jewelry loot, meticulously reconstructed to scale based on news footage and archival documentation. First seeing the diadem in a 2016 Philippine government press conference announcing the collection’s decades-delayed auction, Pio would serendipitously encounter it again, discovering an image of Duchess Gladys Deacon wearing it. It previously belonged to the English Dutchess and before her a Russian empress, with its life continuing through posthumous auctions. However, its limelight dims in the vaults of our government’s treasury; the auction was never realized. “The [tiaras’] outrageous provenance and recurrence in history [turn the tiaras] into intimate and enduring testimonies to endless cycles of violence, upheaval, and impunity,” writes Pio.
The sculptures are an extension of a years-long collaboration with British jewelry designer and Abad’s wife, Frances Wadsworth Jones, an artistic partnership manifested in previous works such as “The Collection of Jane Ryan and William Saunders” (2019). “The process of remaking these jewelry is largely down to Frances’ expertise,” he says. “She already has a jewelry practice well-versed in 3D modeling, so it became this perfect fit.”
Beyond skill, their partnership amplifies Abad’s pursuit of family as a medium to make sense of the world. “The role of family for me is almost always archival. Family is at the foundation of how I work; as much as it’s about larger histories, on a very intimate level, it’s about family histories. Suddenly with Frances, ‘family’ has gained another level of agency, where we are remaking forgotten histories together, actively reconstructing. She grew up in London and I in Manila and we had very different education in terms of colonial history, so we suddenly have this shared mission to fill in the gaps.”
Many looted objects in Western museum collections are not only stolen from their cultures and owners, but are stripped of their societal function and meaning. Such is the case for some kris swords from Mindanao, which Abad thrusts to the public for the first time since their colonial theft in the 19th century. He points out that two of the swords in display have actually been mislabelled for centuries to be from the indigenous Moro people, though “the colorful beadwork in their sheaths would indicate that they come from the Bagobo people; an entirely different indigenous group.”
Bespoke to individual warriors, the kris swords, these wavy, double-edged weapons, once used to fight the presence of colonizers, carry customized visual symbolisms and carefully chosen material that possess a “spiritual potency bestowed upon its owner.” These “orphaned weapons” have thousands of relatives scattered overseas, as Filipino curator Marian Pastor Roces discovered that “90 percent of Philippine material heritage exists in the backrooms of Western museums.”
In continuous pursuit of Philippine history as a conduit for narrating global histories, Abad engages in dialogue with the Benin Bronzes and the Native American Powhatan’s Mantle via a meticulous redrawing. The artist’s dexterous labor is evident in the fine detail of his recontextualization of these objects, a process of finding historical and personal connections. “I am singing a song that can only be born after losing a country” (2023) is a scaled drawing of the underside of the deer hide. The mantle is a symbol of the first contact of British colonists with Native Americans, the birth of the United States, who would then become colonizers of the Philippines. The resulting drawing resembles a map, which Pio calls, “an atlas for the many stolen lands that can never be recovered.” The series “1897.76.36.18.6” (2023) connects his present to the Benin Expedition of 1897, as he discovers his London apartment served as the ammunition storage of the British military preceding their Benin invasion. This information gave Abad a new lens: he started seeing mundane objects in his home as products of invasion, theft, and imperial violence. His intricate ink drawings recreate these objects to scale next to the looted Benin Bronzes. The careful selection of objects in these drawings begs for longer moments to linger, as if an Easter egg hunt for further deduction and meaning-finding.
Beyond an artist, Abad is at once an investigator and ethnoarchaeologist, the exhibition an exposé and reckoning of his findings. To Those Sitting in Darkness is a melancholic lamentation of immense cultural loss; not just of Filipinos but of the globally marginalized—that one needs to leave the motherland to encounter our unknown narratives and history. The exhibition is a nexus to encounter many forgotten objects and narratives for the first time. In this, we encounter a process of creating new decolonized narratives of history through redrawing and remapping connections between stolen objects. But more importantly, we chart on a quest of remapping our own understanding of our colonial history, wondering what else of it remains unknown to us.
