Singapore Biennale 2025:
pure intention

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.

About Singapore Biennale

The Singapore Biennale was established in 2006 as the country’s pre-eminent platform for international dialogue in contemporary art. It presents and reflects the vigour of artistic practices in Singapore and the region within a global context, and fosters productive collaborations and deep engagement with artists, arts organisations, and the international arts community.

The Singapore Biennale cultivates public engagement with contemporary art through a period of concerted activities including exhibitions, public engagement and education programmes that feature artist and curator talks and tours, school visits and workshops, and community days. It complements achievements in other areas of arts and culture, collectively enhancing Singapore’s international profile as a vibrant city in which to live, work and play.

The 2006 and 2008 editions of the Biennale were organised by the National Arts Council (NAC). NAC has commissioned SAM to organise the Biennale since 2011.

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curators

The Biennale will be led by a curatorial network that unites a range of diverse viewpoints, backgrounds and expertise from art collectives, institutions and organisations from Singapore and overseas to create an engaging Biennale experience.

At its core are the curators:

Duncan Bass is a Curator at SAM. His writing and curatorial projects explore the intersections of art and contemporary culture, emphasising the societal implications of emerging technologies. For the Biennale, Bass is particularly interested in mining contradiction, absurdity, and magical thinking as expressions of contemporary social and political anxieties.

Hsu Fang-Tze is a Curator at SAM. Hsu has previous experience as a lecturer in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In the past decade, she has broadened her expertise by actively participating in various artistic endeavours as a curator, film programmer, and archivist. For the Biennale, she is interested in investigating the historical context surrounding art in public spaces by examining the interplay between urban development experiences, community aspirations, and both official and non-official placemaking initiatives.

Ong Puay Khim is the Director of Collections, Public Art and Programmes at SAM. Prior to SAM, she held curatorial positions at the NTU CCA Singapore and ICAS LASALLE. She was part of the curatorial team of Bangkok Art Biennale 2020 and the curator of the Southeast Asia Platform at Art Stage Singapore in 2015. For the Biennale, Ong is interested in engaging practices that respond to and/or are interventions on everyday phenomena as well as reflections on spatiotemporal dimension of place and geography.

Selene Yap is a Curator at SAM. Yap previously held research positions at the Future Cities Laboratory and Singapore University of Technology and Design. She was also Programme Manager for Visual Arts at The Substation where she provided research and curatorial support for the exhibitions. She also previously co-curated several exhibitions as an independent curator. For the Biennale, she is interested in the discussions that challenge the notions of placing and belonging and call to attention the constitutive aspect of absence, dislocation and distancing in the subjective experience of landscape.

contributors

The curators have invited contributions from independent organisations and curatorial collectives around the world. Together, they will bring new and existing projects by local and international artists and artist-run initiatives into public spaces around Singapore.

Asian Film Archive (Singapore)

The Asian Film Archive (founded in 2005) was founded in January 2005 as a non-profit organisation to preserve the rich film heritage of Singapore and Asian Cinema, to encourage scholarly research on film and to promote a wider critical appreciation of this art form. AFA holds Singapore’s first collection of films (AFA Cathay-Keris Malay Classics) inscribed into the UNESCO Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Register, a listing of significant documentary heritage that is a legacy for the world’s community. Founded in 2005 as a non-profit organisation to preserve the rich film heritage of Asian Cinema, AFA is a charity based in Singapore and an Institution of Public Character.

Futura Trōpica Netroots (Tropical Belt)

Futura Trōpica Netroots is an InterTropical Net of Grass-Root Local Networks connecting communities and nets of support and affection within the Tropical Belt (Latin America and the Caribbean, the African Continent, South Asia and South-East Asia, Pasifika ++). It is meant for the lateral exchange of other forms of knowledges, nets and technologies from a Tropikós perspective.

Futura Trōpica will continue to build upon their upcoming project which examines pluriversal data carriers and containers of knowledges. Departing from Singapore’s urbanistic AC tactics, bubble structures and tamed versions of the tropics, the project is an examination on technologies, nets and notions of development in the tropics. Through the study of containers for the preparation, storage, transport and serving of knowledges and data carriers in the tropics, Futura Trōpica intends to interrogate in what forms canonical knowledge is recognised and imported while other situated forms remain invisibilized.

In this iteration of Futura Trōpica led by Abhishek Nilamber, Juan Pablo García Sossa / jpgs as canteeners, along with other contributors invite audiences to interact, inhabit and invoke containers of knowledges and participate in protocols of their execution.

Image courtesy of Futura Trōpica Netroots

Hothouse (Singapore)

Hothouse is a Singapore-based multimedia production studio that supports and prototypes artistic practices. It nurtures experimentation and production as a mode of upending conventions and liberating inquiry. Founded in 2020, it is housed within the symbiotic time-space shared between three entities: new media art collective INTER—MISSION, creative design agency Currency, and speculative research lab formAxioms (fXØ).

This ever-evolving interdisciplinary setup encompasses expertise across contemporary art, technology, design, and architecture, allowing for emancipatory approaches toward knowledge building and dissemination. The collective fosters encounters that strengthen critical and longform creative practices, embracing speculation, excess, and ambiguity as part of its creative exchange with artists, creatives, businesses, and audiences. They do not shy away from speculation, excess, ambivalence, redundancy, ambiguity, inefficiency, etc. Today, Hothouse focuses on technological transdisciplinary work through its Internal Practices series, public programmes, and publications.

Hothouse’s curatorial programming and artistic productions have also been presented at National Gallery Singapore, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore International Film Festival, Singapore Design Week, Singapore Art Week and OH! Open House.

Image courtesy of Juliana Tan

Hyphen— (Indonesia)

Hyphen— was co-initiated in 2011 by Ratna Mufida, Pitra Hutomo, and Grace Samboh as a sustainable conversational space regarding aesthetic practices. Not long after, that space expanded through engagement in various artistic activities, including exhibition-making, various forms of publishing, archiving, research, open-ended conversations, karaoke, barbecue nights, feasts, etcetera. Hyphen— aims to put forward curiosity and people’s common wellbeing as the estuary of artistic practices. They were joined by Akmalia Rizqita “Chita” and Rachel K. Surijata (in 2020); as well as Ruhaeni Intan and Andri Setiawan (in 2023).

They currently play with explorations on the practices of Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru Indonesia (Indonesia New Art Movement, 1975-1989), Kustiyah (1935-2012), and Danarto (1940-2018); exhibition histories surrounding Kesenian Indonesia (Indonesian Art, 1955), BINAL Experimental Arts (1992), Contemporary Art Exhibition of the Non-Aligned Countries (1995); while attempting to unravel Indonesia’s so-called national history through its visual representations.

Image courtesy of Hyphen—

The Packet (Sri Lanka)

The Packet (established in 2019) is made up of a group of artists from Sri Lanka. With a particular focus on hyper-locality, collaborative processes and conversation, it grew out of 8 artists coming together to realize an artist publication entitled The Packet. While a core group of members continue to drive its work, The Packet functions as a collaborative platform that has embraced the work of 19 young artists in Sri Lanka to date. They work across print and digital mediums, with site-specific interventions that respond to a stratified world, exploring what it looks like ‘to do thinking in public’. Their work has been featured in the Serendipity Arts Festival (2019, 2020), the Goethe Institut’s Day-Afterthoughts project (2020), among others.

Image courtesy of The Packet

artists (as of published date)

This list is current as of September 2025, with further participants to be announced closer to the opening.

press

press release

17 Jan 2025 | Singapore Biennale returns in October 2025 with 'pure intention’

1 Sep 2025 | Singapore Biennale 2025: More than 80 artists to activate the everyday with ‘pure intention’

press kit

For press materials, visit here

press information

Singapore Biennale Press Office | [email protected]