07/05/2026
Singapore Pavilion
61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
Amanda Heng, A Pause
Curated by Selene Yap
Amanda Heng presents a body of work centred on everyday gestures: walking, waiting, sitting, and pausing. Her practice attends to the body as a site of lived memory and social encounter, where simple actions hold questions of care, connection, resilience, and time.
In close dialogue with Amanda Heng and Selene Yap, sp/n developed a site-specific architectural intervention that begins from these everyday gestures and the time held within them.
Rather than making a space to be understood all at once, we approached the pavilion as a ground that unfolds slowly through the body. A series of larch wood platforms forms a gradual stepped ground, gently rising and returning across the space. Its movement is simple, but it changes how the space is entered, crossed, and stayed with.
The work began from observing the existing site, the Arsenale, and the everyday pace of Venice, where people often pause, lean, rest, look out, or wait along edges and thresholds. These ordinary moments became part of how we thought about the pavilion.
The stepped ground invites visitors to become more aware of their own pace: to move slowly, to sit, to look through the windows, to stay near the work, or to spend time without needing to arrive at a fixed position. In this way, the space does not separate viewing from inhabiting. Walking, pausing, sitting, and looking become part of the same experience.
We hope the pavilion can quietly hold these small movements: the body shifting, time passing, and the ordinary pauses between Amanda’s work, Selene’s curatorial framing, the pavilion, and the city outside.
Artist: Amanda Heng
Curator: Selene Yap
Architectural Design: sp/n, Bangkok
Pavilion Fabricators: eiletz ortigas | architects, Ljubljana; Rebiennale, Venice
Lighting Design: Phanumas Siriwattanagul
Exhibition Identity and Graphic Design: Currency, Singapore
Commissioned by: National Arts Council, Singapore
Organised by: Singapore Art Museum
Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
