Families can look forward to an array of kid-friendly programmes lined up for the new year ahead at the Singapore Art Museum!
As the new year begins, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) looks forward to bringing more new, thought-provoking presentations for audiences to experience within its homeground at Tanjong Pagar Distripark and beyond, from solo exhibitions to public art trails and experimental online projects that engage with the issues of our time.
Read on to find out what you and your family can look forward to at SAM this year!
Happenings At Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Right within SAM's homeground at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, the Museum looks forward to bringing fresh, thought provoking presentations for your experience. Families can look forward to projects such as solo exhibitions, public art trails and experimental online presentations that engages with the contemporary soul.
Singapore Biennale 2022 named Natasha
Photo Credit: Singapore Art Museum
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark & other venues
Date: now till 19 Mar 2023
Named Natasha, the seventh edition of the Singapore Biennale 2022 invites audiences to go on a journey to find, form and shape a relationship with oneself and the art that is presented. It features over 50 artists and collaborators, bringing together a diversity of artistic practices from across the world (including the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia) and highlights the interconnectedness and interdependency of ideas, influences and networks these geographies have with Singapore and Southeast Asia.
Joo Choon Lin: Dance in the Destruction Dance
Photo Credit: FOGSTAND Gallery & Studio
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 13 Jan to 16 Apr 2023
Through an atmospheric environment that is both a performance space and art installation, Joo Choon Lin: Dance in the Destruction Dance is an exploration of how the present is an illusion, and things are not what they seem. Joo's multisensory environment is an instrument for experimental storytelling that highlights how post-industrial materials, such as plastics, wood and metal can continuously shapeshift.
The installation is accompanied by theatrical performances that highlight this migration of forms and shapes the narrative of the exhibition, exploring how perception (or what we see) are just appearances of what we imagine the world to be.
Lila: Jane Lee
Photo Credit: Jane Lee
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 19 May to 24 Sep 2023
This first museum show of Jane Lee will present new works by the artist that continue her exploration of the practice of painting. Well known for her rich, highly tactile canvases and experimentation with materials and technique, the exhibition will extend Lee’s search for the nature of what painting is: as surface, as object, as body, as an interplay of spaces and sensations. Through more than a decade of re-imagining painting practices, Lee’s work is as much a re-examination of the essence of painting as it is a seeking for the self and one’s being. Alongside the new works, audiences will also be treated to a selection of earlier works by Lee.
Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun
Photo Credit: Hito Steyerl and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul and
Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 19 May to 3 Sep 2023
SAM presents the first Southeast Asia exhibition of Hito Steyerl's acclaimed video installation Factory of the Sun. In this immersive environmental artwork, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl investigates the circulation of images and data in their purest form: light. Drawing on a diverse range of references—documentary film, cable news, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.
Proof of Personhood
Photo Credit: Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: Sep 2023 to Feb 2024
Proof of Personhood brings together local and international artists exploring the unstable relationship between identity, agency, and authenticity in our age of hyper-mediation. Taking advanced technology as both subject and medium, the works in the exhibition use interactive software, AI-synthesised images and genetic engineering to investigate the nature of personhood in the twenty-first century and to reframe aspects central to contemporary life, including online presence, fake news, and biometric data capture.
Ho Tzu Nyen: One or Several Times
Photo Credit: Ho Tzu Nyen and Kiang Malingue Gallery
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 10 Nov 2023 to 10 Mar 2024
One or Several Times is a survey of Ho Tzu Nyen's wide-ranging practice across film, video, installations, and theatrical performances. Beginning with Ho's earlier works such as UTAMA - Every Name in History is I (2003) and EARTH (2009), to more recent works like Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia (2017), Ho will also be working on a new commission work that traces the histories of time, temporalities and horological traditions in the region and beyond.
Happenings At The Everyday Museum
Prove You Are Human By Genevieve Chua
Photo Credit: Genevieve Chua
Venue: Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Building Facade
Date: From March 2023
In an increasingly algorithmically motivated and automated world, how does one identify a real user among automated users? Are we now automated users ourselves? The CAPTCHA codes plastered across the building may be challenging to read, but when they are eventually verbalised, they ring alongside the humdrum of surrounding traffic – the colliding and skewed letters abuzz with movement of vehicles in and around. In Prove You Are Human, Singaporean artist Genevieve Chua employs a method of working that unfurls and reveals the painter's process through diagram, palimpsest, syntax, and the glitch.
Port/raits of Tanjong Pagar
Photo Credit: Divaagar
Venue: Various locations in Tanjong Pagar neighbourhood
Date: 11 Mar 2023 to 9 Mar 2025
Activating sites around the district, Port/raits of Tanjong Pagar is a public art trail responding to an area that has seen a dramatic transformation over the decades into one of the largest seaports in the world today. Inviting perspectives from six contemporary art practitioners, each project is an artistic response to the historicity and/or present-day experiences of their respective sites.
Intersecting interests of urban planning, materiality, boundaries, the non-human and kinship, the works are collectively framed by the development of this locale – the economic aspirations and port traits embedded within the land on which they stand on. Utilising the language of the everyday – i.e. familiar sights, sounds, words, gestures, symbols – Port/raits of Tanjong Pagar offers new encounters with the neighbourhood in unexpected ways.
Singapore Deviation
Photo Credit: Hilmi Johandi
Venue: Various locations along the Rail Corridor
Date: 11 Mar 2023 to 9 Mar 2025
Singapore Deviation marks a series of public art commissions which explore the iconic Rail Corridor in Singapore through the works of Sookoon Ang, Hilmi Johandi, and Tan Pin Pin. Conceived as site-specific installations, each artist offers a unique entry point into the dynamic relationships that animate the adaptation of the site from colonial railway to ecological conservation and leisure.
Taking its cue from the manifold realities that undergird the experience of the Rail Corridor, Singapore Deviation activates encounters and conversations that connect the passage to its shifting publics and uses, inviting new perspectives on the diverse social, historical, and ecological relationships that animate its continued relevance to Singapore’s collective futures.
Speaking of which
Photo Credit: Singapore Art Museum
Venue: Various locations
Date: Ongoing series since September 2022
Speaking of which is a series of self-guided audio trails in partnership with the National Archives of Singapore that uncovers stories and invites renewed readings of the places in which we live. It is an invitation to imagine the scenography of life by walking, looking and listening. Each episode focuses on a specific neighbourhood and features archival records and oral interviews interspersed with commissioned audio works, which serve to expand the narratives that surround each place. The audio trails are available on The Everyday Museum website.
