Lost & Found: Assembly

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) presents Lost & Found: Assembly, a two-day gathering where artists, curators, and thinkers come together to explore how archives are constructed, whose stories they represent, and how they shape creative practices today. Held from 25 to 26 April 2026, the Assembly invites attendees to engage in conversations, screenings, lecture performances, workshops and tastings.

The Assembly includes a series of panel discussions examining different modes of archival practice. Archives Speaking Nearby, featuring Bernardo Mosqueira and Sneha Ragavan, foregrounds a material approach to the archive and the work of independent institutions globally. Archives Speaking from a Distance, featuring Priyankar Bahadur Chand, Catherine Ortega-Sandow, and MJ Flamiano, examines intangible and immaterial archives embedded in the body, and how they are recorded and remembered through activation. Archives Speaking in Whispers, featuring Kulagu Tu Buvongan and Doris Poon, explores close listening as a means of preserving histories in whispers—marginal stories at risk of disappearance.

Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, SAM’s Chief Curator, said: “The Assembly brings together an incredible range of voices working across disciplines and geographies, reflecting SAM’s commitment to convening practices that engage with urgent questions in contemporary art. At a time when histories are being actively rewritten or erased, the question is no longer what we preserve, but how, and for whom. This gathering creates space to test those conditions.”

The programme begins with keynote lecture Scratching on photographs to see with our hearts by visual artist yasmine eid-sabbagh, who explores human agency by engaging in experimental, collective work processes. She reflects on how the act of creating photographs reveals the medium’s inability to fully represent communities subjected to displacement and trauma, and how photographs can be activated and embodied such that seeing happens with our hearts, not just our eyes. Artist Hikaru Fujii, whose multidisciplinary practice examines the relationship between art and society, will also present a lecture performance titled “Fujita-san, Can You Hear Me?” War Archives: On the War Paintings of Tsuguharu Foujita. Additionally, artist and doctoral fellow Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn presents a dramatised table-read performed by veteran actress Karen Tan from her forthcoming film tracing the final days of Vietnamese photographer, Khánh Ký. This foregrounds a more nuanced understanding of photography and its production beyond the West while probing multiculturalism, feminism and collective memory.

Interdisciplinary artist Kiều-Anh Nguyễn will present an experiential tasting activation that responds to the museum's location by the sea, thinking about how states of water can speak to methods of remembering, building on her practice of using olfactory experiences as an alternative form of archival work and as a means of decentralising dominant narratives. A screening by artist Mia Yu, whose practice builds on long-term field research of infrastructures and extractive sites, will speak about her recent film Eme Cosmos (2024), which places a speculative lens on Asia’s largest open-pit mine in Fushun, China, engaging the site as a living “geo-archive," building on ongoing studies into the relationships between post-extractive nature, cosmology and geopolitics within an Asian context. A workshop led by writer and curator Aziz Sohail will draw upon queer strategies to simultaneously map known epistemologies and propose further solidarities and connection, creating a rhizomatic map that reflects his interest in the intersections between archives, art, literature, biography and pedagogy. Throughout the two-day Assembly, artist and researcher Pixie Tan will present An Expanded Edit, a space where attendees may contribute, edit, and assemble their reflections into a personal zine while contributing to a collective, evolving archive of the event.

Lost & Found: Assembly is part of Lost & Found, a multi-chapter curatorial initiative by SAM that explores the significance of archival documentation through artistic inquiry. The final chapter will culminate as an exhibition at SAM, opening in November 2026.

Information about the programmes and tickets can be found on SAM’s website here.