Lost & Found: How We Remember

Archives sound dusty. This one wants to know who got left out.

This is a show for people who like a question to carry round the room, and the question is: who did the remembering, and who got left out? How We Remember is the final chapter of Lost & Found, Singapore Art Museum's multi-phased project on forgotten, fragmented and erased stories, and it opens in Gallery 1 on Level 1 at Tanjong Pagar Distripark on 27 November. The compromise is that it deals in oral histories, language and memory rather than spectacle, so it suits a slow afternoon more than a family outing. General admission is free for citizens and PRs; go in December, when the year-end slowdown leaves room to think.

Earlier chapters dealt in song and movement. In 2024, Lost & Found: Embodied Archive brought in work such as Kang Seung Lee's Skin, according to his gallery, Alexander Gray Associates. This time the focus turns to memory told through language, oral histories and historical narratives, gathered across a range of media.

SAM describes the show as rethinking the archive "not as a site of authority but as a space of care", and that is a useful frame to take in with you. Ask of each work who held the memory and who was left outside it.

The thinking has been public for a while. In April the museum ran Lost & Found: Assembly, two days of panels, screenings, lecture performances and workshops, and introducing it, chief curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa put the question plainly: "the question is no longer what we preserve, but how, and for whom." This exhibition is where that question lands.

Archives sound dusty, and this one is not trying to be fun (it is trying to be fair, which takes longer). Give it an unhurried afternoon, then a coffee in the Distripark, and see what you remember on the way home.

Good to know 27 November 2026 to 18 April 2027, Gallery 1, Level 1, SAM at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road. Open daily 10am–7pm. General admission free for citizens and PRs; check SAM's site for other ticket prices and programmes.

Lost & Found: How We Remember | Singapore Art Museum, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road, Singapore 089065