Lost & Found: Assembly (2026)
Lost & Found: Assembly brought together diverse practices to challenge what an archive is and how it speaks.
Across two days, artists, curators, and thinkers engaged in conversations, screenings, lecture performances, and tastings to examine how the archive shapes creative practice today. The Assembly also addressed the urgency of stories under threat by contemporary geopolitical crises.
Archives are complex entities, serving as houses of ancestral knowledge, living repositories of meaning, and ongoing sites of contestation. At its root, the archive is a place of dwelling, not a passive store of the past. It is a site where memory is actively produced. In this Assembly too, the archive is approached as a dynamic, embodied force shaped through lived actions.
The Assembly is part of Lost & Found, a multi-chapter curatorial initiative by Singapore Art Museum. Working with artists who collect what seems uncollectable, assemble what resists assembly, and refuse stable forms of capture, the project challenges how archives are constructed, and whose histories they serve. Lost & Found culminates in an exhibition at Singapore Art Museum, opening this November.
For the Assembly, I worked closely with the artist Kiều-Anh Nguyễn on a tasting activation titled Station of Refreshment for Travellers on the Straits and with the artist-researcher Pixie Tan on conceptualising an open-ended zine station titled An Expanded Edit that invited responses from participants over the course of the two-day programme. I also moderated sessions featuring Priyankar Bahadur Chand (Kalā Kulo), Catherine Ortega-Sandow & MJ Flamiano (Saluhan Collective and Pagbasa Archive), and Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn.
Images: Singapore Art Museum