From Friday, 2 October 2026, you can walk into Gallery 4 at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in Tanjong Pagar Distripark and pour salt water onto a marble slab as part of an artwork. Entry is free for Singaporeans and Permanent Residents, and the room you walk into this weekend won’t stay the same through next year.
That’s the whole premise of SAMCollection: The Present is Unstable, the third exhibition in SAM’s series built from its own collection. Instead of hanging a set of works and leaving them there, the museum plans to add, remove and rearrange pieces over the run, which ends on 18 July 2027. We flagged the idea back in September, and now the museum has named the first line-up and what comes after it.
A Gallery That Refuses to Freeze
Most permanent collection galleries work like a textbook: one route, one storyline, and the same objects on the same walls for years. SAM has more than 3,800 works in its collection, gathered since it opened in 1996 as Singapore’s first art museum. The museum calls this show a prototype for a more responsive Collection Gallery, so if the format works, it could shape how that collection gets shown in future.
The rotation isn’t a clean reset each time. SAM says certain traces of earlier configurations will stay behind, so each new version builds on the last one. Think of a playlist where a few tracks carry over and the new songs change how you hear them.
Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, SAM’s Chief Curator and the person steering this experiment, puts the question plainly: “a museum collection cannot remain only as a record of what has been acquired or preserved. The Present is Unstable asks a simple question: how can works from the past help us understand the present?”
In practice, that means there’s no single storyline to follow. You pick your own route and make your own connections. Visitors who like a tidy, room-by-room narrative may miss the signposts, but anyone who has ever wandered a museum out of order will feel right at home.
Three Works to Get Into
Our first pick is Gary-Ross Pastrana‘s Water Cuts (stone) (2017). Pastrana is a Manila-based artist and curator known for a conceptual, often funny approach to objects. Here he hands you a ladle and invites you to pour salt water onto a marble slab, drawing on Asian sayings about water wearing down stone. You won’t cut through it in one visit, and that impossible, patient task is the joke and the point together.
Next is Jason Wee‘s Labyrinths (2017). Wee is an artist, writer and curator based between New York and Singapore, and he founded the independent art space Grey Projects. His installation uses oversized, oddly cut-off fences and tactile paving, the bumpy tiles that help visually impaired people navigate. The paving here is laid out in Morse code, spelling fragments of “Archipelago” by Singaporean poet Boey Kim Cheng, so walking through it means reading a poem with your feet.
Rounding out the trio is Sin Wai Kin, a London-based artist working across drag, performance and moving image. The Time of Our Lives (2024) is a 28-minute, two-channel “speculative sitcom” in which Sin plays both halves of a couple as their life milestones loop and glitch. A narrator called The Storyteller, also played by Sin, keeps interrupting with contradictory monologues while a studio audience laughs and jeers on cue. Three framed face wipes smeared with the characters’ makeup hang nearby, and they read like evidence of a character being taken apart.
These three earn top billing because each one makes you do something: pour, walk or sit in on a fake TV taping. That fits the curators’ idea of treating the show like a musical score, where movement through the room becomes part of the work.
The Quieter Works Land Harder
Budget real time for Hao Jingban‘s I Witness (2025). Hao divides her time between Yunnan, China and Berlin, and her work links personal stories to larger events through archives, interviews and performance. This three-channel video runs 54 minutes and 41 seconds and follows people living with long-term grief. Its centre screen documents an “authentic movement” workshop, where movers close their eyes while witnesses watch. It was commissioned by the Han Nefkens Foundation, Mori Art Museum, M+ in Hong Kong and SAM.
For a jolt after that, Manny Montelibano‘s Sorry for the Inconvenience (2011 to ongoing) loops and layers televised speeches and apologies, largely pulled from YouTube, until the words stop making sense. Montelibano is a Visayan media artist and director based in Bacolod, Philippines. Anyone who has watched a public apology go viral will recognise the target.
Nadiah Bamadhaj, a Yogyakarta-based artist, reworks a statue of the matriarch from Jakarta’s Patung Pahlawan (Heroes Monument) in Casting Spells for the Movement (2021). The original shows a woman offering food to an armed farmer. In Bamadhaj’s version she looks visibly fed up with holding the pose, while a nearby video shows young women slowly breaking out of it.
Photography anchors the rest of the room. Chua Chye Teck‘s Eternity (2007) is a set of nine photographs of stripped cubicle partitions in the Rowell Road shophouses before they became the Post-Museum space. Wei Leng Tay‘s Untitled (sister) (2022) sets a colour-corrected family slide from the 1960s or 1970s beside a faded original.
The showpiece of this group is Farida Batool‘s Kahani Eik Shehr Ki (Story of a City) (2012), a lenticular print measuring 20.3 by 2,144cm. Batool is a Lahore-based artist, and the image shifts as you walk past it, carrying you along Lahore’s streets, rickshaws and political posters like a stroll through the city.
What Moves In Next
SAM plans to start swapping works from the end of 2026, with an earlier listing pointing to a second set arriving in February 2027. Incoming names include Lim Tzay Chuen, Singapore’s representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Singapore-born artist Erika Tan, Naeem Mohaiemen, Loeum Lorn and Pio Abad. The museum says to follow its social media for updates, and to watch for chances to see artworks mid-move.
The opening weekend falls within the SAM30 Festival Weekend for the museum’s 30th anniversary. On Saturday, 3 October, Hao Jingban sits down with Han Nefkens and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa to discuss I Witness, moderated by Elaine W. Ng of ArtAsiaPacific. A curator-led tour of the gallery follows the same afternoon.
If you’d rather go at your own pace, the drop-in Stop to Ponder activity lets you leave a question in the gallery for the next visitor to think about. Tours, lectures, panels and workshops are planned across the whole run. Exhibition-inspired merchandise will be sold at SAM’s café, SIP AT SAM.
🗓️ Date: 2 October 2026 to 18 July 2027
📍 Location: Gallery 4, Level 3, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road, Singapore 089065
🎟️ Admission: Free for Singaporeans and Permanent Residents; general admission fees apply for other visitors
🎙️ Opening Talk: I Witness: In Conversation with Hao Jingban, Han Nefkens and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Saturday, 3 October 2026, 2pm to 3pm, The Engine Room, Level 1, S$10 refundable deposit
🚶 Curator Tour: Saturday, 3 October 2026, 3.30pm to 4.30pm, Gallery 4, registration required
❓ Stop to Ponder: Drop-in, 2 October 2026 to 1 February 2027, 10am to 7pm, Gallery 4
🤟 Docent and Deaf Guide Tour: Saturday, 23 January 2027, 3pm to 4pm, Gallery 4, free by registration, with Singapore Sign Language interpretation
A museum trip usually feels like a one-and-done errand, and this show gives you a reason to come back: you can go this weekend, return after the rotation starts, and compare what shifted. With free entry for locals and a salt-water ladle waiting on opening day, it’s an easy one to put on the calendar. Register for the talks and tours and check the latest line-up on the SAMCollection: The Present is Unstable page, then get down to Tanjong Pagar before the first set moves on!
Visuals courtesy of Singapore Art Museum.
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