Singapore Pavilion — Amanda Heng: A Pause
For the Singapore Pavilion at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, artist Amanda Heng presents A Pause, 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 curator Selene Yap, sp/n developed a site-specific intervention that considers how architecture might accommodate these everyday gestures and the time held within them.
The design began with observations of 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 informed an architectural approach that allows different rhythms of movement and stillness to unfold within the pavilion.
The pavilion is conceived as a ground that unfolds gradually through bodily experience. A series of larch timber platforms forms a continuous stepped ground, gently rising and returning across the existing space. At one end, the platforms reach the height of an existing opening, transforming what was once perceived as a window into a doorway. These subtle changes in level influence how visitors perceive, enter, move through and occupy the pavilion, creating different possibilities for walking, gathering, sitting and resting.
Within the large volume of the Arsenale, a curved timber structure further reorganises the space through its scale, position and degree of enclosure. Partially interrupting the view towards the far end of the hall, it establishes different spatial zones without fully separating them. Its opening forms an intimate pocket for the dual-screen artwork, enclosed enough for a concentrated encounter yet open enough to maintain a loose relationship with the surrounding space. Somewhere between a room and an open space, its boundaries remain ambiguous.
Together, the stepped ground and curved structure introduce different spatial conditions while maintaining a continuous relationship with the existing architecture. The platforms extend towards the brick walls and windows, allowing the building and the city beyond to remain part of the experience. Without prescribing a fixed route or position, 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 destination.
Rather than separating viewing from inhabiting, the architecture allows both to become part of the same experience. Through subtle shifts in level, enclosure and openness, the pavilion accommodates different forms of occupation and encounter, bringing the movements of the body, the passing of time and ordinary moments of pause into dialogue with Amanda Heng’s work, Selene Yap’s curatorial framing and the surrounding city.
CREDITS
Exhibition: 61st International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia
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
