TIME TURNER

A 2024 Turner Prize nominee, British Filipino artist Pio Abad talks to Tatler about carrying on family legacy, unearthing historical connections and why the Philippines is always at the core of his work

- Aaina Bhargava

What do the Romanovs, Gladys Deacon the Duchess of Marlborough and Imelda Marcos have in common? The Kokoshnik pearl diadem, a crown encrusted with 144 diamonds and 25 large pear-shaped pearls.

First owned by Empress Maria Federovna, the mother of Tsar Nicholas II, the last tsar of imperial Russia, the piece was auctioned by Christies in 1927 after the fall of the Russian aristocracy to Lenin’s communist regime and bought by American heiress Gladys Deacon, the wife of the ninth Duke of Marlborough. Shortly after Deacon’s death in 1978, Imelda Marcos, the wife of former Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, is said to have purchased the piece.

Few academics, let alone artists, would think to link these seemingly disparate historical figures and events, but British Filipino artist Pio Abad has a knack for unearthing unexpected connections—in this case, in a way that earned him a nomination for this year’s Turner Prize. For the Sphinx (2023), the artist’s take on the diadem and its trajectory, for which he was nominated for the prize, is a part of his solo exhibition For Those Sitting in Darkness, on view at the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford.

The tiara was a collaboration between the artist and his wife, jewellery designer Frances Wadworth Jones, and consists of two bronze-cast recreations of the Romanov diadem. “I love using jewellery as a motif in my work,” says Abad. “Firstly, because my wife is a brilliant jewellery designer and it’s important to collaborate with her, and secondly because jewellery is the ultimate and final witness to so many histories of impunities, collapses and returns.”

History is at the centre of Abad’s practice and his show at the Ashmolean, for which he was granted access to the entire inventory of objects from the University of Oxford collections.