To See A Landscape As It Is’ goes beyond just being a family reunion on canvas, collage, and sculpture. A decade after their last collective showing, the exhibition acts like a marker to the Santos family’s distinct progression as artists, converging again under one roof. The exhibition title’s reference to seeing things as they truly are feels particularly apt: Here is a family of five artists who, despite their intertwined histories, stand confidently as individual creators with their own truths and lived experiences, each continually contributing their distinctive voice to the contemporary art landscape of the country.

Also challenging how we engage with institutions was Pio Abad, who presented a series of works alongside the collection at the Ashmolean in Oxford. I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), for instance, is a vast, intricate and near-abstract drawing in red pencil of the cracked underside of a 17th century Indigenous North American deer-hide hanging.

Most of us who work in and around the archive have come to know that it is organized by an imperial eye, however objective it may feign to be. In her monograph, The Unruly Archive, Stephanie Syjuco simulates this learning and re-learning of the archive as a colonial tool. She depicts a fractured image of the Philippines as told through the American record. Pulling fragments, photographs, and documents from national collections using variations (and even misspellings) of keywords “Filipino” and “the Philippines,” the Manila-born, Oakland-based artist searches for visions of a whole people within the confines of an institution never built to hold them.