Located at the historic port of Tanjong Pagar

Opened in 1996 as the first art museum in Singapore.

Presenting contemporary art from a Southeast Asian perspective for the artists, art lovers and art curious.

SAM Contemporaries: How To Dream Worlds

23 Aug – 13 Sep 2025

Gallery 3

What does it mean to imagine a world otherwise?

How To Dream Worlds, the second edition of SAM Contemporaries, brings together six artists whose practices span installation, moving image and materially driven forms. Their works emerge from diverse concerns—body-machine intimacies, the uncovering of dominant and erased narratives, and the politics of cultivated space—each grounded in the specificities of their own research and lived experiences.

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. Some works speculate on possible futures; others dwell in the traces of what was. Many attend to the present, paying close attention to the undercurrents that shape daily experience. These are not visions of utopias but propositions in motion, open-ended and continuously unfolding. Rather than offering solutions or conclusions, they linger in uncertainty and possibility.

As you move through the exhibition, you are invited to journey alongside the artists in asking what it means to imagine something otherwise. Here, dreaming is 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.

Learning Gallery

2 Aug 2025 - 28 Jun 2026

Gallery 2

Art and childhood share a natural connection.

Both involve freedom, curiosity and fearless exploration. Many of us first create art as children, a time when we learn about the world and shape our emotions, beliefs and memories. What if we could return to that childlike spirit, open to discovery and unafraid to try something new?

This second edition of the Learning Gallery invites you to look beyond the everyday. Explore possibilities, experiment with different ideas and materials, and venture outside the familiar. The artworks here span across diverse mediums and explore themes of identity, home, nature and the environment, people and places, space and memory. They ask meaningful questions about life and inspire new ways of seeing and understanding contemporary art.