Amanda Heng Liang Ngim, A Pause (2025-26). Image courtesy of the artist.
For the Singapore Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2026, Amanda Heng Liang Ngim presents A Pause, an exhibition that extends her decades-long practice of working with the body and the everyday. The exhibition transforms the pavilion into a space for rest and observation, centred on ordinary actions such as sitting, waiting, and watching.
Commissioned by the National Arts Council (NAC), supported by the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth and organised by SAM, Singapore’s 12th presentation at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia underscores the nation’s continued support for artists whose practices engage critically with the world through experimentation, participation and sustained practice. It is also a commitment to supporting Singapore artists such as Heng on international platforms, creating opportunities for them to showcase their work to a wider audience and strengthening Singapore’s presence in the international visual arts landscape.
A pioneering figure in Singapore’s contemporary art scene, Heng’s practice began in the late 1980s as a response to the social and artistic conditions of a rapidly modernising city-state. Spanning performance, installation, photography and participatory acts, her work has consistently focused on the body as both subject and medium. This focus is grounded in close attention to the everyday, treated as both method and material.
Heng’s practice does not follow a linear development but creates a web where core gestures and inquiries reappear across decades. In her early works, such as Let’s Chat (1996) and Walk with Amanda (2000), she established a method of unscripted, social encounter. These live performances used simple acts like household tasks or leading an audience through a hawker food centre to examine how public and domestic spaces are shaped, gendered and negotiated. The body in these works is a social body, negotiating its presence within the architecture of the everyday.
This foundational interest is also evident in the pivotal photographic series Parts of My Body (1990). Using direct, unadorned close-ups of her own limbs and joints, she presented the body as a matter of fact: a site of personal attention rather than public display. This early investigation into the body’s materiality and agency prefigured a lifelong exploration of how identity and history are carried physically.
A Pause therefore brings together these moments at a scale and intensity shaped by the context of Biennale Arte 2026, inviting visitors to think about how endurance and renewal are cultivated not through grand gestures, but through the quiet, persistent rhythms of daily life—through the body’s instinctual capacity for rest, resilience, and self-determination.
The official opening of the Singapore Pavilion will be on 6 May 2026 at the Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi. The exhibition will be on display on the second floor of the building from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
