The Living Room

What happens to a performance when it ends? Where does its liveness go, and how might we make sense of what remains?

The Living Room marks the final chapter of a three-part collaboration between Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). First conceived around the notion of sharing, the project brings together the collections and perspectives of the three institutions to reflect on how museums communicate, convene, and create commons across borders. This edition turns towards a shared challenge: how to collect, care for, and meaningfully re-present performance-based works – works that, by their very nature, resist materiality and permanence.

The Living Room responds to these questions by taking its name and form from living room: a space that is intimate yet shared, lived-in yet always changing. More than a metaphor, it is also a model for how an exhibition might function as a place of gathering, return, and ongoing engagement. Echoing the live-ness of performance, The Living Room invites a shift in how we understand performance remnants – not merely as static records, but as elements within a dynamic space of exchange and activation. It becomes a testing ground for how performance might be collected, presented, and sustained – embracing uncertainty, process, and the possibility of failure.

Featuring works from the three institutions, alongside artists working within their orbits, The Living Room explores the afterlives of performance through ephemeral acts, participatory exchanges, unrealised proposals, and traces that sit uneasily between artwork and archive. It asks what it means for museums to care for the intangible: not simply to hold it as past, but to host it in the present.

During the course of the exhibition, some works may shift or unfold gradually, while others may come to life through scheduled or spontaneous activations. The Living Room invites audiences to dwell, return, and encounter the exhibition not as a fixed display, but as a space that lives.