The National Gallery Singapore (NGS) has launched its first exhibition dedicated to the architecture of its two iconic buildings.

The ArchiGallery's first exhibition, Listening To Architecture: The Gallery's Histories And Transformations, will allow visitors to learn more about the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings.

The exhibition, located on the fourth floor of the City Hall wing, opened earlier this month and will run for at least three years, complementing daily tours showcasing the history of the buildings.

The immersive exhibition will highlight NGS' key architectural features. While the main dome of the former Supreme Court cannot be accessed by the public, visitors can now take a virtual tour through an interactive 360-degree visualisation. In another similar virtual tour, they can also imagine what it feels like to be an accused person walking up a stairway from the holding cells to a courtroom.

Artefacts excavated from beneath the two buildings of the gallery between 2009 and 2010 will also be on display for the first time.

These include a porcelain figurine of the Guan Yin Bodhisattva from the 1300s, which suggests that Buddhism might have been one of the belief systems in the ancient port settlement of Temasek, and a toothpaste lid from the colonial period, dating from the early 1800s to the 1950s.

Dr Eugene Tan, director of the NGS, said that the exhibition is "a means by which the Gallery may look self-reflexively at its own history within the Singapore Civic District, and to make sense of the district and cultural planning that has long made the site an important landmark".

Admission to the exhibition is free.