Singapore Art Museum (SAM)

39 Keppel Rd, #01 02, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore 089065

Descriptions

Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention

31 October 2025 -29 March 2026

SAM Gallery 1

Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention presents contemporary art in multiple venues and public spaces, inviting audiences of all walks of life to experience Singapore’s many layers built by all of those who have been a part of its history, collectively creating a city that is as planned as it is full of discovery, surprises and interesting juxtapositions.

Through an exploration of art in everyday environments, audiences will be engaged to see familiar spaces in Singapore with fresh eyes and new perspectives, paying attention to the rituals, histories, lived experiences and aspirations that have shaped our environments and urban lives.

As part of the SG60 celebrations, the Biennale offers Singaporeans an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s historic milestones and shared aspirations while imagining possible collective futures.

The Biennale will engage with spaces ranging from pre-colonial and colonial landmarks transformed into public, green areas repurposed for recreation, residential neighbourhoods and lived spaces, to shopping centres that have evolved into social spaces for Singapore’s diverse communities.

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.

Under the Same Sky: A Think! Contemporary Primary School Exhibition

21 Nov 2025 - 1 Jan 2026

The Engine Room

Under the Same Sky: A Think! Contemporary Primary School Exhibition is where questions, colours and stories come alive! Step into the world of 10-year-olds as they show you who they are, the places they call home, and the stories we all share. See how different voices and ideas connect and take shape to express their feelings and experiences, unfolding Under the Same Sky.

Under the Same Sky: A Think! Contemporary Primary School Exhibition is the 13th edition of the Think! Contemporary programme, presented by Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in partnership with CHIJ Our Lady Queen of Peace, Geylang Methodist School (Primary), Haig Girls’ School, Mayflower Primary School, St. Anthony’s Primary School and Xinghua Primary School.

Opening Hours

SUNDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

MONDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

TUESDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

WEDNESDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

THURSDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

FRIDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

SATURDAY, 10:00 - 19:00

Blocked Out Dates