The Living Room

Performance art never sits still. Belonging to time, it vanishes just as it happens – leaving behind questions, afterimages, even a bit of chaos. But what if what remains is not merely a trace, but an opening for something else?

The Living Room explores how museums might collect, care for, and re-present performance-based practices. Like the living room in a home, this exhibition considers what it means to create a space that is private yet shared, settled yet always in flux. More than a metaphor, it becomes a way of being: a model for how an exhibition might gather people, hold ideas, and remain open. Here, The Living Room invites us to think of performance traces not merely as static records, but as elements in a shifting space of encounter and exchange.

This show completes a three-part collaboration between Singapore Art Museum (SAM), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA). It brings together works from the collections of the three institutions alongside invited artists. Through ephemeral gestures, participatory encounters, unrealised proposals, and archival fragments, The Living Room reflects on the afterlives of performance – not as endings, but as openings for reactivation, relation and return.

The Living Room is presented in parallel with Talking Objects in the Collection Gallery. Together, the two exhibitions invite reflection on how art is experienced, interpreted, and carried through time and space.

Image credits: Brian Fuata, image courtesy of SeMA; Chuyia Chia, Knitting the Future (2016), and Ezzam Rahman, Allow Me to Introduce Myself (2015), images courtesy of SAM; Kim Garam, the AGENDA hair salon (Aug 2015, Düsseldorf), Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1978–1979 (1978–1979), and Jeremy Hiah, Metamorphosis (2022), images courtesy of the artist; Wong Hoy Cheong, Lalang – Archives (1994), image courtesy of NHB.