Lost & Found: Embodied Archive

Come face to face with a 7m-long canvas rolled on by naked bodies serving as “human paint brushes”. Take a tour of the Malaysian landscape belonging to the indigenous Bidayuh people from inside an artist’s mouth.

Or examine 50 mother-of-pearl shell pieces, each a miniature of an eye belonging to coastal workers in the Philippines.

These “bodily” encounters, provocative and occasionally grotesque, will be presented at the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) from Oct 25.

On show for just a month, Lost & Found: Embodied Archive is SAM curators’ effort to explore the human body as archive, usually thought of as two-dimensional documents and video files.

Nine works by seven artists experiment with how the body can also serve as a living record, remembering past experiences and continually accruing new sensations.

There are works by Singapore pioneer Lee Wen, Malaysian Bidayuh-Anglo Australian artist Tiyan Baker and Filipino miniature carver and painter Gregory Halili, among others.

Make sure to check out the set times for live performances. For instance, on Oct 25 at 6.30pm, Indonesian ceramic artist Albert Yonathan Setyawan will bring to life his arrangement of pagodas titled Cosmic Labyrinth. Each small structure has apparently been infused with spirituality by the artist with a contemplative technique.

Malaysian Bidayuh-Anglo Australian artist Tiyan Baker’s Mouthbreather. PHOTO: SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM

Where: Gallery 3, SAM, 03-07 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel RoadMRT: Tanjong PagarWhen: Oct 25 to Nov 24, 10am to 7pmAdmission: FreeInfo: bit.ly/LostandFound-EmbodiedArchive

NLB’s horror booth at Haw Par Villa

After creating a personalised story, visitors will enter a multisensory booth to experience it. PHOTO: NLB

As Halloween approaches, those with a hankering for the spooky can wend their way to Haw Par Villa, where horror of the literary kind awaits.

By toggling with just a few settings to personalise their preferred location, characters and ending, visitors create their own scary story, with the help of an artificial intelligence prototype jointly created by the National Library and Amazon Web Services.

They can then read it in an immersive multisensory booth from a screen embedded in a model attap house surrounded by overgrown greenery and crunching piles of dried leaves underfoot.

Beware strobe lights, phantom rats and other strange companions. Note that only those aged above 15 will be able to enter due to the intense simulations.

The NLB station, called StoryGen (Horror Edition), will also introduce visitors to a curated list of horror stories that people can borrow on the NLB mobile app.

Mr Winston Tan, the library’s deputy director for planning and development, says: “We welcome partners and the community to collaborate with us as we continue on our journey of innovation and experimentation to reimagine libraries.”

Where: Haw Par Villa, 262 Pasir Panjang RoadMRT: Haw Par VillaWhen: Oct 25 and 26, 6pm to midnight; Oct 27 and Nov 2 and 3, noon to 6pmAdmission: FreeInfo: str.sg/dNdz

Deja Vu: When The Sun Rises In The West

The Reclining Buddha With Volcano (2019). PHOTO: THE PRIVATE MUSEUM

What if Buddha took a walk in Naples and left his footprints in the mosaics now so representative of the volcanic ash-covered first-century Roman city of Pompeii?

Thai artist Natee Utarit’s Deja Vu series is being exhibited at a second space in Singapore, after STPI opened its Deja Vu: Buddha Is Hiding exhibition in September.

This second exhibition at The Private Museum in Upper Wilkie Road likewise features the artist’s vision of a hypothetical world where boundaries between the East and West are blurred.

Expect the Buddha to pop up in iconic Western imagery, most daringly in The Last Admonition At Vaishali (2018), which takes after Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (circa 1495 to 1498) now housed in Milan.

Natee’s works, which explicitly put Eastern and Western symbols within the same frames, challenge notions of Western cultural dominance and seek a reversal of cultural influence as Buddha – sometimes  coquettish – takes a stroll under Greco-Roman structures.

Where: The Private Museum, 11 Upper Wilkie RoadMRT: Dhoby Ghaut/RochorWhen: Till Dec 8, 10am to 7pmAdmission: FreeInfo: str.sg/7PZj