Come year 2022, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) looks forward to presenting art in unexpected spaces around Singapore by actively collaborating with partners and communities.
New Space At Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Photo Credit: Singapore Art Museum
Opening Date: Jan 2022
SAM is also proud to announce the opening of its new contemporary art space at Tanjong Pagar Distripark (TPD), which will open in January 2022.
Opening Programmes
REFUSE
Photo Credit: The Observatory, The Idealiste
Venue: Gallery 1, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan to 17 Apr 2022
Metamorphosis, evolution, and dissolution are at the heart of The Observatory’s ethos. The band’s continual reinvention of themselves unfolds in REFUSE, an immersive world inspired by the word “refuse.” It draws on their past and present influences, bringing together the band’s interest in fungi and mycelial networks to explore the twin ideas of decomposition and composition from both biological and musical perspectives. The presentation comprising a time-based installation space and archive speaks to The Observatory’s constantly evolving methodologies, the communities that surround them, as well as their important place in the Singapore music scene.
Gan Siong King: My Video Making Practice
Photo Credit: Gan Siong King
Venue: The Engine Room, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan to 17 Apr 2022
A presentation of recent video essays by Malaysian artist Gan Siong King featuring Kecek Amplifier Bersama Nik Shazwan, a video installation that explores the gamut from the production of bespoke electric guitar amplifiers in Malaysia to pre-millennial pop culture, and My Video Making Practice. The latter is a new work that provides a humorous reflection on Gan’s video practice. Screenings of My Video Making Practice will take place on select weekends, and be accompanied by a dialogue session with the artist and a moderator. Gan’s video works often draw on the aesthetics and sensibilities of music videos, images and memes from internet video culture, as well as humour that often found in Malaysian politics and culture.
Korakrit Arunanondchai: A Machine Boosting Energy Into The Universe
Photo Credit: Korakrit Arunanondchai, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY
Venue: Gallery 2, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan to 3 May 2022
Spirits live through our videos and machines: phone cameras that capture sightings of mythical creatures, drones that act as ghostly eyes in the sky. In A Machine Boosting Energy into the Universe, Korakrit explores the togetherness of human, machine, and spirit in 21st century Bangkok, a city where animistic energies and advanced technologies co-exist in everyday life. The exhibition centres around the artist’s iconic large-scale video installation, Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 (2015-16) from the SAM Collection. Visitors will enter an environment resembling a postapocalyptic wasteland, with used electronics, auto parts, and clothing that have been refashioned into cyborgian figures. Korakrit invites us to be together, not only among humans, but also in communion with machines and ghosts.
Present Realms
Photo Credit: Salty Xi Jie Ng
Venue: The Main Deck (#03-07), SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 14 Jan to 23 Jan 2022
Present Realms marks the conclusion of the pilot SAM Residency programme. It is a fluid project space for the mushrooming of ideas, works-in-progress, and lines of research. Hinging upon themes of intimacy and infrastructure, the three pilot Residents—Chu Hao Pei, Salty Xi Jie Ng, and Johann Yamin— present their continued explorations into varied topics of interest spanning rice, rituals, and gaming. These commingling practices invoke portals towards other realms—a glimpse at methods, visualities, and beliefs present in contemporary worlds both familiar and distant.
Other Highlights
Lonely Vectors
Venue: Public libraries, SAM hoardings, and SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 19 Feb to 28 Aug 2022
Lonely Vectors presents a series of artworks and new commissions that draw our attention to the fault lines, choke points, exclusive zonings and infrastructural politics that characterise our global economy. Agricultural and irrigation channels, trade and shipping routes, economic zonings and migratory patterns are engraved across the surface of the earth, and are integral to our contemporary lives. Yet these lines and networks do not simply reflect a linear or smooth flow of goods around the world; they are also evidence of uneven distribution. Lonely Vectors will be showcased across multiple spaces, including local libraries and public hoardings, before coming back to focus on the site of the logistics warehouse at Tanjong Pagar port.
Singapore Art Book Fair
Photo Credit: Singapore Art Book Fair
Venue: SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 29 Apr to 1 May 2022
First of its kind in Southeast Asia, the Singapore Art Book Fair (SGABF) is an independent annual multi-day event celebrating contemporary art books and zines. SGABF is committed to deepening the understanding of art books in Singapore and encouraging the exploration of this diverse medium as a crucial, if not central aspect of art practices.
After a successful run in the previous edition, SGABF 2022 continues to feature the ‘Adopt-an-Exhibitor’ programme, allowing local exhibitors to share their booths with an international exhibitor. This ensures the continued showcasing of international publications, despite being based outside of Singapore, and provides a platform for collaboration between local and international participants.
Superfluous Things: Paper
Photo Credit: Li Hongbo
Venue: Gallery 2 & The Engine Room, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 27 May to 14 Aug 2022
Superfluous Things: Paper is an interactive exhibition for the young at heart. This exhibition highlights the work of contemporary artists as storytellers, evoking precious personal and cultural memories, through a long tradition of paper manipulation. The works astound through the transformation of a piece of paper into objects of visual feast and irresistible emotional resonance.
Can Everybody See My Screen?
Photo Credit: Urich Lau
Venue: Gallery 2, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark
Date: 9 Sep to 18 Dec 2022
Can Everybody See My Screen? looks at the various ways in which artistic practices engage with an increasingly digitalised world – from technological mediation of the senses and the body, to social critique, to how digital spaces may engender possibilities for self-identification, kinship, and love. Drawing from works in the SAM Collection and through new commissions, the exhibition will traverse both the physical and online space, highlighting recent explorations while tracing back to earlier practices in the decade following 2000.
Riffing off a common refrain from over a year’s experience of adjusting to remote interactions, Can Everybody See My Screen? encapsulates the ambivalence of bodies navigating technology, with the screen as interface and locus of mediation.
Singapore Biennale 2022
Photo Credit: Singapore Art Museum
Venue: Various venues
Date: 18 Oct 2022 to 19 Mar 2023
Singapore Biennale (SB2022) will return for its seventh edition from 18 October 2022 to 19 March 2023. Helmed by four Co-Artistic Directors from around the world, the team comprises Binna Choi from South Korea/the Netherlands, Nida Ghouse from India, living in Germany, June Yap from Singapore and Ala Younis from Jordan.
In an attempt to apprehend and grapple with questions pressing for humanity, the SB2022 will conceive ways in which to relate to a public without relying on spectacle. Turning away from the conventional preoccupation with the visual, it will dwell instead on interiority, and gather around other senses and sensibilities. The Co-Artistic Directors invite artists, curators, researchers and publics to imagine the possibilities of a biennale, of art and life, and of being.
