The Everyday Museum allows audiences to form new experiences of places, making art accessible to everyone.

 

Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has launched The Everyday Museum, the museum’s long-term public art initiative offers art projects and programmes across Singapore to inspire interest and curiosity in art. In line with its vision of being a “disappearing museum”, SAM will bring artistic interventions into everyday spaces, transforming them into cultural nodes with site-specific artworks by local and international artists, beginning from the Tanjong Pagar district.

The commissions and art programming for The Everyday Museum will be made for and alongside communities, with a focus on making art accessible to everyone. Beyond bringing vibrancy and creativity into everyday life, the initiative will allow audiences across Singapore to form new experiences of places, reconsider spatial and environmental constructions, while facilitating conversations and the spirit of collectiveness. The hope is that in the next few years, members of the public can look forward to experiencing commissioned artworks at spaces such as neighbourhoods, public parks, spaces of work and leisure.

The Everyday Museum will also provide local and international artists with a platform to create works in the public sphere, experiment with new mediums at a different scale, and forge interdisciplinary collaborations that connect different sectors and interest groups. The content will be offered in a variety of formats, from art trails and discursive programmes to live events and interactive online resources.

Two other public artworks commissioned by The Everyday Museum with the support of Mapletree are sited in the public areas of Tanjong Pagar Distripark. They are The Oort Cloud and the Blue Mountain: Edition Tanjong Pagar Distripark (2022) by Hazel Lim-Schlegel and Andreas Schlegel, in collaboration with neuewave, and Creatif Compleks (2018/2022) by Michael Lee. With the launch of The Everyday Museum, these two artworks will join Wayang Spaceship as part of the first series of public artworks within the district.

Wayang Spaceship by Singaporean artist Ming Wong is a site-specific work presented as a reimagining of a mobile Chinese opera wayang stage. The installation contemplates upon the history and evolving form of Chinese opera through the years, exploring the human condition with the cosmos through the figure of the scholar-warrior, a time-travelling consciousness who traverses memories of the past, present and future. Understood to be an avatar of Wong, the scholar-warrior is present within the futuristic installation as a consciousness that moves through and within time in endless spirals, wielding both brush and sword in a quest to discover how information technology drives historical conceptions and the future of Asia.

The Everyday Museum will develop an annual line-up of art commissions and programmes. This will lead up to the launch of a quadrennial International Public Art Festival, which will feature a constellation of themed programmes, including large-scale projects and artistic interventions in public spaces, activation of sites and communities through a series of live events and participatory activities.

In the months ahead, members of the public can look forward to two public art trails in the Tanjong Pagar district and along the Rail Corridor. More details will be revealed in due course.

More information on The Everyday Museum can be found at https://bit.ly/SAM-TheEverydayMuseum. Admission is free for all artworks under The Everyday Museum.