Learning Gallery

2 Aug 2025 – 28 June 2026

SAM Gallery 2

Art and childhood share a natural connection.

Both involve freedom, curiosity and fearless exploration. Many of us first create art as children, a time when we learn about the world and shape our emotions, beliefs and memories. What if we could return to that childlike spirit, open to discovery and unafraid to try something new?

This second edition of the Learning Gallery invites you to look beyond the everyday. Explore possibilities, experiment with different ideas and materials, and venture outside the familiar. The artworks here span across diverse mediums and explore themes of identity, home, nature and the environment, people and places, space and memory. They ask meaningful questions about life and inspire new ways of seeing and understanding contemporary art.

The Living Room

12 Sep 2025 – 19 Jul 2026

SAM Gallery 4

Performance art never sits still. Belonging to time, it vanishes just as it happens – leaving behind questions, afterimages, even a bit of chaos. But what if what remains is not merely a trace, but an opening for something else?

The Living Room explores how museums might collect, care for, and re-present performance-based practices. Like the living room in a home, this exhibition considers what it means to create a space that is private yet shared, settled yet always in flux. More than a metaphor, it becomes a way of being: a model for how an exhibition might gather people, hold ideas, and remain open. Here, The Living Room invites us to think of performance traces not merely as static records, but as elements in a shifting space of encounter and exchange.

This show completes a three-part collaboration between Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). It brings together works from the collections of the three institutions alongside invited artists. Through ephemeral gestures, participatory encounters, unrealised proposals, and archival fragments, The Living Room reflects on the afterlives of performance – not as endings, but as openings for reactivation, relation and return.

The Living Room is presented in parallel with Talking Objects in the Collection Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions invite reflection on how art is experienced, interpreted, and carried through time and space.

Talking Objects

12 Sep 2025 – 19 Jul 2026

SAM Gallery 4

Talking Objects examines the meanings that quotidian objects and everyday representations amass through use and circulation. Casting daily encounters in new light, the artists in the exhibition explore the emotions and value we accord to the material and visual world around us.

Presented in unexpected or unsettling contexts, commonplace objects are imbued with human experience and emotions, revealing ambiguous histories and memories. By the actions of artists, the mundane is transformed into incisive instruments of expression—words become gestures, language turns visual, the intangible is rendered material and the inanimate comes to life.

Drawn primarily from the collection of Singapore Art Museum, the works in Talking Objects encourage us to take a close look at the world we inhabit and seek new ways of seeing, thinking and meaning-making. As we face an entropy of images, information and values, how do we talk with and about objects, and what do objects say of us?

Talking Objects is presented in parallel with The Living Room in the Collection Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions invite reflection on how art is experienced, interpreted, and carried through time and space.

Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega: Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest

16 Jan - 31 May 2026

SAM Gallery 3

Artists Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega explore how the demands of a relentless extraction, from plantations to electric futures, cast a shadow on the very "breath of the Earth."

Elia Nurvista and Bagus Pandega: Nafasan Bumi ~ An Endless Harvest imagines the afterlives of materials that persist long after their use, outlasting our time in this age of excess. Plantations, mining sites, and the promise of electric vehicle technologies become places where the stories of tomorrow are formed, bound by Indonesia’s extractive economies whose resources sustain the pulse of today’s global demand.

From the need for oxygen to nickel’s role in lithium-ion technologies, from the cutting down of forests to palm oil’s many applications, these materials represent the state of the Earth’s breath (Nafasan Bumi) today, strained by extraction. The planet’s natural rhythms no longer move freely but are drawn into the labour of industry, breathing through the exhaustion of a harvest that never ends.

Across the exhibition, labour appears as both memory and speculation, a rhythm shared by humans, machines, and the living world. Conveyor belts, once emblems of the industrial revolution and the mechanisation of labour, now hum to the pulse of tropical plants, creating a continuous cycle of productivity. Nearby, sculptures cast in palm oil wax evoke the stillness of carved stone yet resist ideals of perfection, creating a dreamscape haunted by plantation residues. Others, made from discarded palm waste, hold the tension between fragility and endurance.

Together, these artworks trace how human and non-human life have been enmeshed in cycles of ceaseless pursuit of productivity, asking: What will the future shaped by these material conditions? Like the recurring haze that engulfs Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia during the southwest monsoon, the Earth’s breath, shadowed by an endless harvest, lingers as a reminder of what extraction conceals and refuses to let us forget.