The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) has announced that trailblazing feminist performance artist Amanda Heng will represent Singapore at the 2026 Venice Biennale, while Selene Yap, a curator at SAM, will oversee the project’s curatorial concept. At 74, Heng will be the most senior artist to stage a solo exhibition at the Singapore Pavilion in Venice, and only the second woman to hold this role, following Shubigi Rao in 2022.

Heng, who is renowned for her performance pieces that engage with sociopolitical issues, emerged in the late 1980s during a significant shift in the Singaporean art scene toward more experimental practices. In her body-centric oeuvre, she probes contemporary concerns about gender, societal norms, and embodied memory through everyday actions like walking and speaking. One of her most acclaimed works, Walking the Stool (1999), involved Heng taking her studio stool for a walk on the streets of Singapore to protest the national restrictions on performance art. (The government had decided to withdraw all funding for the art form in 2004, effectively banning it for a decade.) In 2010, Heng received the Cultural Medallion for Visual Arts, Singapore’s highest artistic honor, for her contributions to the nation’s arts and culture scene.

In a statement, Eugene Tan, co-chair of the commissioning panel and CEO and director of SAM, noted: “[Heng’s] sustained and evolving practice offers compelling ways of engaging the world through the body, performance, and lived experience. Her work resonates with the urgencies of our time while being grounded in personal truth and poetic clarity.” He added that her selection of Yap as the curator “reflects a collaborative relationship that brings together distinct artistic and curatorial sensibilities, promising a thoughtful and resonant presentation that will shed fresh light on contemporary global concerns pertinent to today’s international art world.”

The exhibition at the Singapore Pavilion will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026 at the Sale d’Armi in Venice.

Stella Wu is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.