The Singapore Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale presents photographic and video works from the pioneering artist, Amanda Heng, some of which have never been seen before, alongside architectural intervention, offering a timely reconsideration of Heng’s foundational relationship with the camera and the body, linking Singapore with Venice.
The work is a culmination of Heng’s four-decade practice, drawing on her sustained attention to the body, everyday gestures, and unscripted social encounter. The presentation reflects a shift from the charged immediacy of her early public performances to a quieter, more interior mode of attention.
Parts of My Body (1990, reprinted 2026), comprises of nine large-scale photographic prints, displayed leaning directly against the pavilion walls. Created when Heng was in her early thirties in collaboration with Chen Kunyi, who was studying darkroom techniques at the time, Heng created close-ups that isolated body fragments. Revisited nearly four decades later, the series presents close-up fragments of the artist’s body—an elbow, shoulder, hand, clavicle—isolated from the full figure and rendered with striking intimacy. Neither portrait nor documentation, the images transform skin and form into near-landscape, shifting between immediacy and abstraction.
A Pause (2025–26), a new dual-channel video work, split between Singapore and Venice, captures people, including five Venetians, ranging from a vaporetto driver and a DJ to a Ukrainian artist and a Venetian art teacher, in quiet, everyday moments of rest—watering plants, preparing breakfast, walking, gazing at the sky. Shot in real time, it reflects how ‘rest’ is not fixed, but personal and embedded into daily routines. The pavilion itself has been reconfigured through architectural intervention, inviting visitors to sit, lean or lie down.
Artist Amanda Heng Liang Ngim said, “A Pause transforms the Pavilion into a quiet and open space for a rest, inviting visitors to find their own way of slowing down, to spend time and be present. There are no rules or instructions. Each person moves freely through the space differently. And you may notice how the body carries itself feeling at ease and at peace, wondering what it means to pause.”
The Pavilion’s curator, Selene Yap, said, “Amanda Heng’s work grounds itself in the everyday—how we move, pause, and sustain ourselves through small gestures. This presentation shows that practice at full scale, transforming the pavilion into a space where visitors complete the work simply by being present.”
A Pause is presented from 9 May to 22 November 2026. The exhibition will move to Singapore in January 2027, where it will be reimagined for a second iteration at SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark.
Commissioner: Elaine Ng, National Arts Council Curator: Selene Yap
Exhibitor: Amanda Heng Liang Ngim
Organised by Singapore Art Museum
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