Lost & Found: Embodied Archive unpacks how artists radically re-envision the body as a reservoir of memory. This reservoir retains convergences of the past and present while offering the possibility of new encounters.The participating artists demonstrate how memory is ingrained in history by incorporating physical encounters into their artworks. This is accomplished through a variety of bodily manifestations that use the body as a historical informant and a means of personalising social and cultural experiences. In making space for what lies in the body, these works choreograph our encounters with them, activating us as viewers.

Installation view of 'Lost & Found: Embodied Archive’ at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

Refusing to remain static, Lost & Found: Embodied Archive embraces the process of becoming by making space for the live nature of performative works. Many of the artists whose works are on display in this gallery have conceptualised performances, workshops and talks. The exhibition will unfurl slowly over the month as works are activated in turn, creating an intentional space for movement, rhythm and reflection.Lost & Found: Embodied Archive forms the second pillar of Lost & Found, a multi-year curatorial study on the interplay between artistic practices, memory and the notion of the archive. When one thinks of an archive, what often intuitively comes to mind is a physical site with material objects, records and documents. This project seeks to expand on that understanding by inviting viewers to consider the body as an archive.

Installation view of 'Lost & Found: Embodied Archive’ at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.

📌
Site: Singapore Art Museum
Date: 25 October 2024 - 24 November 2024

• ↜ Back

The travelling exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey is the first major solo exhibition in Southeast Asia dedicated to the work of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. The survey exhibition presents a broad range of artworks that employ diverse media to touch on the major themes of his three-decade-long practice – embodiment, experience, perception, as well as the urgency of climate action and more-than-human perspectives. In his art practice, Eliasson has been driven by the desire to make the ungraspable tangible.

Installation view of ‘Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey’ at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark; Photo: Joseph Nair, Memphis West Pictures; Image courtesy of the artist and Singapore Art Museum; © 2024 Olafur Eliasson

To compensate for the distances that the exhibition will travel, Eliasson and his team have sought ways to reduce its carbon footprint, including through changes in installation practice, maintenance, packaging, energy consumption, and, especially, transport. Artworks were selected that are lightweight, already located in the region, or whose materials can be sourced locally in order to keep transport distances to a minimum. Many of the artworks on view in the exhibition reflect Eliasson’s environmental concerns. The last seven days of glacial ice (2024), for instance, presents the stages in a melting ice block that was found and scanned on a beach in Iceland, and The glacier melt series 1999/2019 (2019), a series of photographs taken by the artist in Iceland in 1999 and again from the same perspectives in 2019, shows the decimation of the country’s impressive glaciers over the past twenty years.

Installation view of ‘Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey’ at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark; Photo: Joseph Nair, Memphis West Pictures; Image courtesy of the artist and Singapore Art Museum; © 2024 Olafur Eliasson

📌
Site: Singapore Art Museum
Date: 10 May 2024 - 22 September 2024

• ↜ Back

SAM Contemporaries is a biennial project focusing on emerging practices and generative trends in Singapore art. Fueled by collective research, SAM Contemporaries is a platform for experimentation, built upon sustained conversations and close collaboration between artists and curators.

Yeyoon Avis Ann, A Collisional Accelerator of Everydays (A.C.A.E.), 2023, Installation view at ‘SAM Contemporaries: Residues and Remixes'.

The inaugural edition titled Residues & Remixes considers the impact of historical remnants on the present as well as the influence of new technologies on how we see, experience and understand the world. Migration and cultural flows have defined the region's history, its landscape, memories and economies. In this exhibition, artists adopt new methods and approaches rooted in de- and post-colonial perspectives to engage with residues of time and place, excavate hidden histories and uncover forgotten stories. With an eye on the impact of digital technologies on contemporary experiences, the artists unveil intersections between the past and the present.From everyday experiences to everyday materials, the works presented in Residues & Remixes highlight the ways in which the artists are remixing and reimagining these residues of time, creating new narratives and reinterpreting the past and present with a broadened lens.

Yeyoon Avis Ann, Trees Upside-down, 2023, Installation view at SAM Hoardings at 8 Queen St.

📌
Site: Singapore Art Museum and SAM Hoardings at Bras Basah Rd and 8 Queen St
Date: 18 May to 24 September 2023

• ↜ Back

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 logistical warehouse at Tanjong Pagar port.

Zarina Muhammad, Joel Tan and Zachary Chan, Dioramas for Tanjong Rimau, 2022, Installation view at 'Lonely Vectors'.

Cian Dayrit, Penitent Plant, 2022, Installation view at 'Lonely Vectors'.

At selected public libraries, Seeding Sovereignty (2022) is artist Chu Hao Pei’s attempt to provide an alternative mode of seed distribution. The work takes the form of a seed library, and is designed to build on shared knowledge, affirm our mutual dependence, and reimagine different ways of organising ourselves. It emerges from the artist’s long-term interest in rice and its circulation within Singapore and Southeast Asia.As a cumulative index of texts, stories, and images, visitors are encouraged to interact with the seed library by gleaning information from its drawers and taking a packet of rice seeds home with them. As one rummages through these holdings, established methods of information arrangement give way and new meanings can be composed through these materials. By providing a reflective topography of rice that is both mutable and empirical, Seeding Sovereignty invites audiences to reconsider their relationship to the land, the food we eat, and how one humble crop can knit a region together.

Chu Hao Pei, Seeding Sovereignty, 2022, Installation view at 'Lonely Vectors: Seeding Sovereignty', Ang Mo Kio Public Library.

📌
Site: Singapore Art Museum, SAM Hoardings at Bras Basah Rd and 8 Queen St, and various public library locations
Date: 3 June to 4 September 2022

• ↜ Back

• ↜ Back