Singaporean artist Amanda Heng proposes A Pause amid fraught Venice Biennale

VENICE – Amid political rows, last-minute resignations and artistic pageantry at a fraught Venice Biennale, Singaporean pioneer artist Amanda Heng proposes rest.

The 74-year-old invites visitors to Singapore’s 250 sq m seaview space at Venice’s Arsenale to sit on custom larch-wood stairs and take in its musky scent or look across three grand windows in her work, titled A Pause. Their simple gestures unconsciously mirror the acts of rest depicted in her two-channel video work, which shows Venetians twirling a leaf or splayed on a couch, or Heng herself stretching in the park and reciting the Heart Sutra.

“The moment the visitor comes in, they are already performing in my space without knowing,” she tells The Straits Times.

Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth David Neo was at Arsenale’s Sale d’Armi building to open the pavilion on May 6. Singapore has participated in 12 Venice biennales, presenting 20 artists since 2001.

Mr Neo, who said he left the pavilion “renewed”, said of Heng’s work: “It’s an invitation for us to take a moment to reflect and to contemplate, a moment to slow down amidst our fast-paced, always connected lives, a moment to appreciate the seemingly mundane around us so we can return with a better appreciation of the beauty of the world.”

Best known for exploring the power of everyday gestures like walking and peeling beansprouts in her performance works, Heng – the most senior artist to stage a solo at the Singapore Pavilion – now explores what it means to perform in absentia.

“How you engage with space is to allow the space to be empty, to clear off all the clutter. And then, when people come in, they feel comfortable and natural to come into themselves and figure out their position,” says Heng of her site-specific show. The quiet space she has created is a contrast to the spectacle on show elsewhere, with the high-octane performance installation featuring nude performers by Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger drawing crowds on vernissage day.

In Minor Keys is the theme of the main curatorial exhibition, headed by the late Cameroonian-Swiss art curator Koyo Kouoh, although Heng says her interest in rest predated the announcement of the theme. Caring for her ailing mother, who died in 2023, pushed the Cultural Medallion recipient to consider the necessity of rest and led her on this project of asking Venetians about their anxieties. A teary Heng, who thanked her late mother at the opening, delivered a tribute to her.

Three trips in to Venice, Heng discovered common themes – the sinking of Venice, its overdependence on tourism, an overseas Ukrainian artist’s worries about the war – and wondered about the moments of quiet in between. Heng, who is fond of reading by her sea-facing apartment in Punggol and practising taichi, became interested in how people’s bodies adjust to rest.

A Pause also draws a line to Heng’s early engagement with the body by presenting large-scale photographic reprints from her 1990 photograph series Parts Of My Body – featuring isolated fragments of Heng’s body, from her clavicle to a breast – which are scattered around the steps of the pavilion. The artist monograph Amanda Heng: On And On completes the presentation.

Commissioned by the National Arts Council and organised by the Singapore Art Museum, the Singapore Pavilion is curated by the museum’s curator Selene Yap. Asked if stillness can win over audiences at the frenzied Venice Biennale, which has close to 100 national pavilions, Ms Yap says: “What the pavilion does is not pander to these binaries – whether it’s spectacle or stillness, politics with a big ‘p’ or the personal with a small ‘p’.”

After Singapore’s biggest Venice Biennale representation in 2024, the 2026 contingent is more modest. Other Singaporean participants include Ong Kian Peng, whose work is on show at the Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation’s The Spirit Of Maritime Crossing, and curator Annie Jael Kwan, an organiser of the Asia Forum. National Gallery Singapore’s director of curatorial and collections Lisa Horikawa is also co-curator of the Japan Pavilion’s presentation of artist Ei Arakawa-Nash’s take on queer parenting.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale has been rocked by controversy as Russia – whose pavilion will not be open beyond the vernissage – returns for the first time since the Ukraine war, and with the Art Not Genocide Alliance planning a 24-hour strike on May 8 and demanding the axing of Israel’s pavilion, which remains open.

Heng will bring the show back home during Singapore Art Week in 2027 and is already looking at ways to respond to the site-specificity of Tanjong Pagar Distripark. She hopes to incorporate gestures of rest by the Singapore public too, “so that they can also become conscious of their own abilities to have rest”.

The Venice Biennale opens to the public from May 9 till Nov 22.