Dramatis Personae: 1001 Lives opens at Gajah Gallery Singapore on 29 October 2026, and the release says it runs until 29 November, with work by 15 women artists from Southeast Asia and beyond. If you’re one person at the office, another at Sunday family lunch and someone else entirely in the group chat, this show is about that exact juggle.
The gallery says both the opening reception on Thursday, 29 October and a drawing workshop on Saturday, 31 October are open to the public. That’s welcome news for anyone who has hovered outside a gallery door wondering whether they’re allowed in (you are). The workshop costs S$5, which makes it a low-stakes add-on to a month already stacked with things to do in Singapore this October.
A Theatre of Selves
The title borrows from the stage, where dramatis personae is the cast list printed at the start of a play. Gajah Gallery describes the exhibition as “a theatre of selves”, with each artist playing actor and author at once, conjuring several versions of a person inside a single artwork. The second half of the name nods to One Thousand and One Nights, the story collection whose narrator survives through storytelling, night after night.
That narrator, Scheherazade, is the thread running through the whole show. The idea is relatable, because it treats contradiction as a strength and the roles women get handed as a starting point to write past.
Filipino artist Wawi Navarroza takes the brief most literally, naming her staged self-portrait after Scheherazade herself, with the subtitle The Burden of Representation. The labels “ASIAN” and “ORIENTAL” lie at her feet like sashes from a pageant she has walked out of, and it’s the sharpest single image of what this exhibition argues: other people’s labels are costumes, and she gets to decide when to take them off.
Who’s Behind the Curtain
The show is curated by Joyce Toh, formerly a senior curator at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM). Toh curated Confabulations: A Fantasy of the Real, the inaugural exhibition at Gajah Gallery Manila, which ran from 28 November to 31 December 2025, so she already knows how this gallery stitches the region together. Gajah has been at it since 1996 and operates across Singapore, Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Manila, and that reach shows in the roster.
Singapore is represented by Suzann Victor and Sarah Choo Jing, alongside the late Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih (1966 to 2006). Malaysia sends Fadilah Karim and Kayleigh Goh, Indonesia brings Dzikra Afifah, Satya Cipta and Betty Adii, and the Philippines contributes Nona Garcia, Goldie Poblador and Navarroza. Rounding it out are Lê Hiền Minh (Vietnam and the United States), Soe Yu Nwe (Myanmar), and Thailand’s Aracha Cholitgul and Imhathai Suwatthanasilp. If National Gallery Singapore’s sweeping Tropical was how you first met Southeast Asian art, this is a far more intimate room, with seven countries in the region speaking through one theme.
Three Works Worth the Trip
With 15 artists on the walls, start with Aracha Cholitgul’s Beware! Of Investment Scams (2026). It’s a painting of figures with cardboard boxes for heads, milling around a gallery beneath a red banner warning about investment scams, and it will hit home for anyone whose phone pings with suspicious “opportunities” every week.
The joke lands because it’s set in a gallery, the very kind of room you’ll be standing in to see it. Faceless people performing as art lovers, investors or marks is the “many selves” theme turned into satire, and it’s the work most likely to end up on someone’s story by opening weekend.
Next, Dzikra Afifah’s glazed stoneware sculpture Crude Fuse (2026), which the gallery lists at 64 x 47 x 54cm. In a show heavy on photography and painting, a chunky ceramic piece on a plinth gives your eyes somewhere else to land, and its sheer mass makes it worth circling slowly.
Finally, Sarah Choo Jing’s 2015h, the Diasec print at the top of this article, which the gallery lists at 56.7 x 100 cm. A marble counter, rows of backlit bottles, a goldfish tank and one woman alone in a booth add up to a scene that feels mid-story, as if she’s between two of her lives. That’s exactly the mood this exhibition is chasing!
Opening Night on 29 October
The opening reception starts at 6pm on Thursday, 29 October, and the release names Ms Jane Ittogi, Spouse of the 9th President of the Republic of Singapore, as Guest of Honour. Both Sarah Choo Jing and Kayleigh Goh will be there too, so it’s your best chance to ask Choo Jing about that woman in the booth, or to size up Goh before her workshop two days later.
Draw a Room for S$5
The workshop is called ‘A Room of One’s Own: Presence, Space & Atmosphere’, and it runs from 3pm to 4.30pm on Saturday, 31 October. Malaysian artist Kayleigh Goh guides participants through drawing and watercolour, experimenting with line, colour and layered washes to build an atmospheric picture of a room.
The clever twist is that the room should hold traces of a person without showing them directly. Think of your HDB bedroom: the charger cable trailing off the desk, the hoodie on the chair, the mug nobody’s washed. Each one says more about you than a selfie would, and that’s the exercise. At S$5 per person with all materials provided, it’s an easy yes for anyone who’s been meaning to try watercolour, though the gallery says slots are limited.
Goh’s own A Turn (2026), listed by the gallery at 150 x 90 cm, gives a hint of her style: an arched wooden panel worked in gesso, acrylic and cement, with a pale iceberg floating at its centre. It’s quiet, textured and spacious, the kind of approach that suits a workshop about atmosphere over detail.
🗓️ Date: Exhibition runs 29 October to 29 November 2026; opening reception Thursday, 29 October 2026; workshop Saturday, 31 October 2026
⏰ Time: Opening reception from 6pm; workshop 3pm to 4.30pm
📍 Location: Gajah Gallery Singapore
💰 Price: Workshop S$5 per person, all materials provided, limited slots
🔗 Details: RSVP for the workshop at art@gajahgallery.com; more on Gajah Gallery’s website
Fifteen artists, one Scheherazade and a month-long run means there’s room to visit twice: once on opening night to hear from the artists, and again when it’s quieter so you can sit with Navarroza’s sashes and Cholitgul’s box-headed crowd. Grab one of the S$5 workshop slots before they go, and check Gajah Gallery for updates on the show. Your many selves are all invited!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Gajah Gallery.
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