Amanda Heng at Venice: A Practice Built on Everyday Gestures

At the Singapore Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, Amanda Heng's A Pause unfolds as a space designed less for viewing than for staying.

The installation combines a new dual-channel film, enlarged photographic works from Parts of My Body (1990), and a spatial intervention that reshapes the interior of the Sale d'Armi into stepped platforms for sitting, leaning and resting. Rather than separating artwork and audience, the pavilion places both within the same field of attention: bodies in space, moving slowly or not at all.

Heng, now 80, has been central to Singapore's contemporary art history since the late 1980s. She was a founding member of The Artists' Village, established in 1988 as the country's first artist-run contemporary art space, and later founded Women in the Arts (WITA) in 1999. Working across performance, photography and installation, her practice has consistently turned toward ordinary actions and social exchange as material for art — a tendency already visible in her early participatory works.

Let's Chat (1996) is typical of her approach: participants sat together peeling bean sprouts while talking, turning a repetitive domestic task into a shared duration. Walk with Amanda (2000) took a different form but followed a similar logic, leading participants through everyday urban environments and shifting attention onto the act of moving through the city rather than arriving anywhere in particular. More viscerally, Let's Walk (1999–ongoing) asks participants to move backwards through public space holding a mirror and a high-heeled shoe in their mouth — deliberately awkward, producing a tension between bodily control and instability that plays out in real time.

Parts of My Body (1990), shown in Venice in a new iteration, belongs to the same body of thinking but operates differently. Consisting of close-up photographs of the artist's own body — an elbow, a shoulder, a hand, a clavicle — the series reframes physical presence as fragment rather than whole. Installed at scale and placed directly against the pavilion walls, the works carry the quiet weight of time simply through their reappearance, nearly four decades after they were first made.

At the centre of the pavilion is the newly commissioned A Pause (2025–26), a dual-channel film shot across Venice and Singapore. It follows five individuals through everyday situations — watering plants, preparing breakfast, walking through streets, looking out across the city. The group includes a vaporetto driver, a DJ, a Venetian art teacher, a Ukrainian artist and Heng herself. Moving between these figures without narrative hierarchy, the film finds its subject not in what happens but in the quality of attention brought to small, continuous actions.

"My work comes from ordinary experience," the artist said. That much is evident in everything around the visitors.

The pavilion's architecture operates on the same principle. Stepped platforms allow visitors to sit or lie down at different heights and points of view, slowing movement through the Sale d'Armi and making duration part of the encounter with the works. 

Nothing in the space directs how it should be read or how long it should hold attention. In that sense, A Pause asks of its visitors exactly what Heng's work has always asked: simply to be present to what is already there.