Talking Objects and The Living Room

From September 12, 2025 to July 19, 2026, Singapore Art Museum (SAM) presents two exhibitions—Talking Objects and The Living Room—that explore the material and ephemeral dimensions of contemporary art. Together, they examine how meaning accumulates, transforms, and transmits across time and space.  

Featuring 23 works by 22 artists across Asia, the exhibitions draw from the collection of SAM alongside selected works from Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). Newly commissioned performances will further animate the gallery, highlighting the evolving nature of meaning and interpretation. 

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Chief Curator of SAM, says, “Talking Objects and The Living Room challenge conventional frameworks of collecting and exhibiting, opening up new ways of experiencing contemporary art. Shown in parallel, they affirm SAM’s commitment to advancing Southeast Asian perspectives and strengthen international collaborations, positioning the museum as a site of research and exchange.”

Talking Objects features works drawn primarily from the collection of SAM that complicates our perception of the world by casting everyday objects in unexpected settings. Subodh Gupta’s Hungry God glorifies commonplace stainless-steel household wares as a gleaming, towering sculpture. Its striking beauty juxtaposes with the banality of its material and prompts reflection on industry, consumption, mundaneness and value.

In Mang Emo + Mag-himo Grand Piano Project (3rd Movement: Manila-Fremantle-Singapore), Alwin Reamillo collaborated with craftsmen to reconstruct a piano from discarded parts, weaving family legacy and a longing for artisanship into an instrument that embodies the spirit of collective making—through inviting others to use the piano to create new works, the life of the object is extended with new memories. 

Centered on a solitary typewriter, Christine Ay Tjoe’s Lama Sabakhtani #03 transforms the writing tool into a metaphorical object. Striped to reveal a bodily form, the object is bathed in music. Pain is felt when one presses the keys, and the connection triggers a change of emotion in the sound composition. While Ay Tjoe contemplates joy after suffering, in Third World Extra Virgin Dreams, Suzann Victor exposes human desire and fragility through staging a bed—the site of life’s desires, fantasies, beginning and end—suspended as if in spiritual flight yet grounded by a quilt composed of thousands of bloodstained lenses.  

Running in parallel, The Living Room explores how performance-based practices—works shaped by time, immediacy and impermanence—can be collected, remembered and reactivated. Inspired by the living room in a home, the exhibition invites thinking of performance traces not merely as static records, but as elements in a shifting space of encounter and exchange.  

Ten years on, Ezzam Rahman revisits his 2015 talcum performance Allow Me to Introduce Myself with Allow Me to Reintroduce Myself reflecting an ageing body and evolving relationship to performance. Chia Chuyia’s Knitting the Future, originally staged in 2016, saw her weave and wear a garment made entirely from leek in a durational act of labour and care. Through performance, the garment will be worn a final time before being laid to rest, foregrounding cycles of preservation and decay.

Jeremy Hiah's Performance Journal Scroll maps two decades of art practice across a ten-metre scroll, where drawing becomes memory work—recording, revisiting and reanimating past performances. Brian Fuata presents an on-site improvisation in response to the exhibition and its containment. Shaped through voice, movement and audience encounter, it charges the room with palpable energy that exists only live. 

Nam Hwayeon's Ehera Noara reconstructs a 1933 dance by Choi Seung-hee from archival fragments. Performed by Chung Ji Hye, it bridges historical absence with contemporary presence. Kim Ga Ram's The AGENDA Hair Salon turns the gallery into a functioning salon where haircuts are exchanged for conversation, turning the haircut into a symbolic gesture of personal belief or solidarity.

Both exhibitions will be accompanied by performances, tours and artist talks. General admission fees apply (Free for Singaporeans and PRs). For more information, visit Talking Objects and The Living Room.