The Everyday Museum will showcase commissioned artworks into lived, communal spaces, expanding the possibilities and potential of art in Singapore.
With The Everyday Museum, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) strives to continue bringing art into shared spaces throughout Singapore and become a key driver of public art; reaffirming the museum’s commitment to demonstrate the vital role of art in society.
The commissions and art programming for The Everyday Museum will be made for and alongside communities, with a focus on making art accessible to everyone. Beyond bringing vibrancy and creativity into everyday life, the initiative will allow audiences across Singapore to form new experiences of places, reconsider spatial and environmental constructions, while facilitating conversations and the spirit of collectiveness. It will also provide local and international artists with a platform to create works in the public sphere, experiment with new mediums at a different scale, and forge interdisciplinary collaborations that connect different sectors and interest groups.
The Everyday Museum will be launching a series of site-specific public artworks that will radiate outwards to lived and communal spaces in various districts. Here's a list of some of the public artworks located across Singapore that visitors can look forward to:
Artworks At Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Photo Credit: Ming Wong
Ming Wong’s Wayang Spaceship (2022)
Venue: Container Bay, Rear Entrance of SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 15 Jul 2022 to 31 Jul 2024
Fee: Free admission
A Wayang Spaceship has landed on our shores. Alongside the industrial, technological and ecological crises that have taken place throughout time, it also stands witness to our place in the cosmos. During the day, the Wayang Spaceship is seemingly dormant, its reflective surfaces mirroring the bustling traffic around the container seaport. Its own inactivity is interrupted by the occasional stray radio transmission relayed from another dimension.
At dusk, the Wayang Spaceship reclaims its former role as a travelling Chinese theatre, illuminating the past, present and future with an operatic symphony of light, sound and image, as though it is livestreamed from the memory of a scholar-warrior, a time travelling consciousness who moves freely between the past, present, and future. Each day, after the SAM closes, the Wayang Spaceship activates with light, sound and film, allowing the public to commune with this solitary figure of Chinese opera.
The Wayang Spaceship will evolve over a two-year period featuring a range of performances and access programmes.
The Oort Cloud and the Blue Mountain: Edition Tanjong Pagar Distripark (2022)
Venue: Cargo Lift, Lobby B, next to SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2023
Fee: Free admission
The Oort Cloud and the Blue Mountain: Edition Tanjong Pagar Distripark is an installation work by Hazel Lim-Schlegel and Andreas Schlegel, in collaboration with neuewave. It refers both to Blue Mountain, an early 20th century painting by Wassily Kandinsky and the Oort Cloud, an astronomical phenomenon described as an extended shell of icy objects that exist on the outer reaches of our solar system. The distant Oort Cloud, out of reach to our capacity to experience, is the opposite of tangibility and perceptibility which the Blue Mountain represents. The work thus refers to the broader idea of senses and/or the limit of sensing, that some things can be tangible and sensed but remain distant from our comprehension.
The installation is also a reflection of the increasingly digitalised world where technology has become a key mediator of human experiences – the large-scale vinyl print of an abstract image of the Blue Mountain is generated by a computer program, animated by a series of light fixtures; a set of QR codes further extend the physical experience of the work into a virtual space. Visitors are invited to scan the QR codes for 3D micro-experiences through which they can explore and interact with the relief objects as well as capture and share their experience through the use of selfies. The digital content will be refreshed quarterly by other local artists invited by the Schlegels. This, and other potential activations, not only offer viewers new encounters with the work but also open it up to an organic and evolving process of improvisation and adaptations.
Michael Lee Creatif Compleks (2018/2022)
Photo Credits: Singapore Art Museum (unless otherwise stated)
Venue: Side gate entrance of Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan 2022 to 31 Dec 2023
Fee: Free admission
Creatif Compleks is the culmination of Michael Lee’s reflection on the function of the artist’s studio within the arts ecology of a city. The work takes the form of a diagram about a hypothetical property development consisting of various configurations of the artist’s home/studio. The use of LED rope lights, a popular fixture in advertising and interior design, alludes to latent apprehensions about the development and promotion of the arts in Singapore which today are, arguably, at a feverish pitch. Informed by myths and fantasies of artists in their studios, the work takes a speculative leap into the utopian and the absurd.
In the months ahead, members of the public can look forward to two public art trails in the Tanjong Pagar district and along the Rail Corridor. More details will be revealed in due course.
[Gojek Promo] Enjoy $5* off your Gojek ride to SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark (39 Keppel Road) with the promo code, 'GOSAM'.
More Upcoming Art Trails & Commissions At More Public Spaces
With the aim of transforming Singapore into an open-air museum, where art is an integral part of the urban landscape and its social fabric, The Everyday Museum will develop an annual line-up of art commissions and programmes. This will lead up to the launch of a quadrennial International Public Art Festival, which will feature a constellation of themed programmes, including large-scale projects and artistic interventions in public spaces, activation of sites and communities through a series of live events and participatory activities.
The public can look forward to experiencing more commissioned artworks at spaces such as neighbourhoods, public parks, spaces of work and leisure in the next few years.
Admission is free for all artworks under The Everyday Museum.
For more information, visit the The Everyday Museum website.
