SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds (2025)
What does it mean to imagine a world otherwise?
How To Dream Worlds, the second edition of SAM Contemporaries, brought together six artists whose practices span installation, moving image and materially driven forms.
The exhibition’s title proposes a reading of these practices, approaching dreaming as a method and form of resistance, gesturing towards other ways of living, relating and perceiving from within the conditions of the now.
Viewers were invited to journey alongside the artists in asking what it means to imagine something otherwise in moving through the exhibition space. Here, dreaming was not about arriving at a final, perfected “elsewhere,” but about staying with the process—the slow, ongoing work of questioning the world as it is, and imagining what it could still be and become.
SAM Contemporaries is the museum’s biennale commissioning platform that supports emerging artists in Singapore. Each artist is paired with at least two curators and given ample resources to realise a work, a programme, a performance, or anything that feels right for them at that point of their practice. Given its intensity and scale, the exhibition is a team-wide effort. A large curatorium was dedicated to this edition of the exhibition so as to provide dedicated support to each artist.
I worked closely with the artists Fazleen Karlan and Chu Hao Pei on their presentations along with my curatorial colleagues Angelica Ong and Angela Pinto.
Participating Artists: Chok Si Xuan, Chu Hao Pei, Fazleen Karlan PG Lee, Masuri Mazlan, and Syahrul Anuar.
Images: Singapore Art Museum