ART SG FILM: Would You Tell Me a Story Until I Fall Asleep

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.

Curated by X Zhu-Nowell

Line-up:

• Deep Sleep (2014), Basma Alsharif | 12:37min | PG
• You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light (Episode 1) (2022), Haig Aivazian | 7min | PG
• Kindred (2021), Lêna Bùi | 7:38min | Presented by Galerie Urs Meile | PG
• Where Was the Point of No Return (2023-2024), Marcel Odenbach | 39min | Presented by Galerie Gisela Capitain | NC16
• Time Travels with a Rotten Suitcase (2025), Sim Chi Yin | 8:27min | Presented by Zilberman Gallery | PG13
• Electric Silence (2024), Geoffrey Pugen | 16:39min | Presented by MKG127
• Smoke for Sonata (2020, 2021), Samson Young | 15:49min | Presented by Galerie Gisela Capitain | PG
• Rebooting, Rerooting (2025), Lo Lai Lai Natalie | 13:06min | Presented by JW Projects | PG
• Inspired by Transliteration — Chapter Three: Wavelength (2018), Li Ming | 18:58min | Presented by Antenna Space | PG

Total film programme duration: 135min

Showtimes:

22, 23, 25 Jan (Thu, Fri & Sun)
11am – 1.30pm
2.30pm – 5pm

24 Jan (Sat)
11am – 1.30pm

26 Jan – 1 Feb (Mon to Sun)
11am – 1.30pm

For more information on ART SG Films, please visit here.

About the Curator

X Zhu-Nowell is a curator, writer, and institutional practitioner currently serving as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM) in Shanghai. Based between Shanghai and New York, their practice is shaped by relational authorship and an ontological approach to curating that resists demands for coherence, instead working through contradiction, displacement, and the labor of (mis)translation.

Prior to joining RAM, Zhu-Nowell was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014–2021). Their exhibition Wu Tsang: Anthem was named one of the best exhibitions of 2021 by The New York Times, and they were part of the curatorial team for Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.

Image credit: Film still from Electric Silence (2024), Geoffrey Pugen. Courtesy of MKG127.