Pure Intention

Celebrating sixty years of independence means, for Singapore, traversing a territory where collective memory intertwines with the urban and cultural landscape, and where every planning decision has produced layered, often contradictory, and unexpected consequences. The 2026 Singapore Biennale, titled Pure Intention, presents itself as a poetic and conceptual journey through these tensions, exploring the relationship between intention and outcome, between design and chance, between official narrative and lived experience.

The concept of “pure intention” is not merely a theoretical abstraction. As curators Duncan Bass and Hsu Fang-Tze explain, it reflects the uniqueness of a city-state that, in just sixty years, has transformed its geography, architecture, and social life through visionary planning and decisive political choices. Yet the purity of intention inevitably meets the complexity of reality: “good intentions” rarely align with the material or symbolic effects they produce. It is precisely in this interstice—between aspiration and reality, between design and the unforeseen—that the Biennale’s works come to life, inviting audiences to explore Singapore not as a static postcard but as a living, layered, and dialogic organism.

The curatorial journey extends beyond traditional museum walls. Urban space itself becomes both stage and laboratory: from historic neighborhoods to iconic buildings, from abandoned shops to places of worship, each site hosts works that interrogate memory, collective biography, and the aesthetic dimensions of urban intentionality. The Indonesian collective Hyphen, for example, presents Figures, Dedications, and Civilisations, a political and historical reflection on dioramas as tools to learn, unlearn, and relearn history, blending artistic narrative with the biography of emblematic figures such as painter Emiria Sunassa. In parallel, The Packet transforms a vacant shop in the Far East Shopping Centre into an internet café-installation, where the digital dimension becomes corporeal and spatial, evoking an era when the web was a space to inhabit, explore, and share.

Dialogue with the city is essential. Singapore itself is not merely a backdrop but a conversation partner: each curatorial project becomes a sensitive translation of the city’s social, urban, and ecological complexity. The engagement of citizens, schools, and local communities in performative and participatory practices—such as Akira Takayama/Port B’s itinerant project, which transforms research from National University of Singapore architecture students into an urban board game—underscores the Biennale’s aim to create an intergenerational and collective experience, where learning becomes play and participation becomes reflection.

Contemporary art in Singapore, as Duncan Bass notes, is both vibrant and paradoxical. Scarce physical space has driven artists to transform every crack, every urban interstice, into an opportunity for experimentation, producing works in the most unexpected places. This principle guides the Biennale: art that emerges from everyday life, engages with urban existence, and makes the invisible visible.

From mine curatorial perspective, Singapore is more than a collection of iconic buildings and planned districts: it is a complex organism in continuous metamorphosis, where concrete coexists with vertical greenery, where urban efficiency intersects with the irregularity of markets and alleyways, and where historical memory and technological innovation intertwine in the social fabric. Walking through the city, one senses a delicate balance between control and freedom, between intention and surprise, between what is planned and what life unexpectedly produces. The Biennale becomes a tool for reading and listening: not simply to display art, but to reveal the multiple perspectives of a city growing upon itself, constantly reinventing. It invites audiences to look beyond the surface, to perceive the tensions, contradictions, and hidden narratives composing Singapore, transforming the artistic experience into a poetic and intellectual map of the city-state.

© Charlotte Madeleine Castelli | All rights reserved