ART SG FILM

The film program for Art SG 2026, Would You Tell Me a Story Until I Fall Asleep? by X Zhu-Nowell, invites the spectator into an engagement with the image, using the darkness of the cinema as a site of contemplation. In this black box, the mind becomes its own quiet chamber—like a camera obscura—where images can arrive differently: slower, more porous, attentive. Here, the intention is to explore the essential feature of the image: its ability to affect the viewer not through rhetoric, but through singular, subjective encounters.

These films confront us with the nature of the image as something tied inextricably to the past—that-has-been. The image becomes a kind of spectrum, a quiet but insistent return of what is no longer with us.

You are invited to rest in this darkened chamber. Sleep is employed not as a retreat but as a method: an archive that allows memory and sensation to drift upward.

Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep folds geography through trance and breath; her pointing gestures become a pure language of “look,” “here,” “this.”. Haig Aivazian’s You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light (Ep.1) turns a blackout city into a study of illumination, ghosts, and the infrastructures that choreograph us. Lêna Bùi’s Kindred drifts through reincarnation and underworlds, letting memory pass across water and species. Marcel Odenbach’s Where Was the Point of No Return threads decades of footage into a restless constellation of histories that refuse to settle. Sim Chi Yin’s Time Travels with a Rotten Suitcase moves across colonial slides and family lines, reminding us that the image carries both tenderness and violence. Geoffrey Pugen’s Electric Silence enters a forming digital consciousness, asking what it means to believe an image today. Samson Young’s Sonata for Smoke reveals the ritual of making an image—the gesture, the risk, the trace. Lo Lai Lai Natalie’s Rerooting, Rebooting metabolizes grief into continuities, reminding us that even the smallest organisms hold their own elegies. Li Ming’s Inspired by Transliteration – Chapter Three: Wavelength employs experimental film techniques to raise questions about the nature of movement and perception in urban space.

Together, these works form a nocturnal constellation. I hope you can rest here, drift a little, and allow the films to meet you where you are. We will resurface together on the other side.