To Those Sitting In Darkness showed at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 8 September 2024. Now the exhibition is due to open at the Tate Gallery, London from 25 September 2024 — 16 February 2025. Abad’s work will be shown alongside the work of the three other Turner prize nominees: Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas. The winner will be announced on 3 December 2024.

With Syjuco’s process of being meticulous and conceptual, the exhibit offers a montage of counter-narratives, a visual stream-of-consciousness of images that have been rephotographed, resized, and digitized from the seemingly objective photographs of a newspaper collection. In doing so, Syjuco offers a new context to such images that informs each person’s reception and remembrance of events in history.

Always traveling with a sketchbook in hand, Abad recorded the migrant experience in different parts of the world, showing the universality of the collective trauma of displacement and extending it to a commentary on the condition of exile, identity loss and assimilation rapidly spreading worldwide. The show successfully highlights Abad’s unconditional openness to other cultures, listening and emphasizing humanity in all its variety while portraying both the positive and negative aspects of globalism in her work.