NUS Museum & Baba House

Open call ends this weekend!   Museum Lab 2026 invites participants to engage exhibitions as sites for intervention - working within and alongside existing displays to explore new ways of encountering artworks. Here is the second of three sites!   ‘The Evocative Head’ revisits Ng Eng Teng’s exploration of the human head as a site of expression, where emotion, identity, and form are shaped through fragmentation, distortion, and recomposition.   At this site, participants are invited to respond through sound-based performance or installation. Taking cue from Ng’s process, you’ll explore how meaning might emerge through relation - through overlaps, interruptions, and encounters between voices, bodies, and forms in sound.   👉 Read the intervention briefs and apply by 20 June here: https://nus.edu/ml2026

Museum Lab 2026 is a four-week programme that explores museums as sites of inquiry, encounter, and practice. Through lectures, workshops, and discussions led by artists, curators, and cultural practitioners, participants will engage with how exhibitions, collections, and archives are constructed and experienced.   This year centres on interventions as a situated practice. Participants will work in groups to develop site-specific responses across three locations within NUS Museum: “The Evocative Head”, “Radio Malaya”, and the Resource Library, through formats such as sound, video, and vocal or performance-based works.   Apply before 20 June 2026! Visit: https://nus.edu/ml2026

With NUS Baba House currently under conservation, the stories don’t stop, they just move beyond its walls 👣🏠   Step into Blair Plain, where the neighbourhood itself becomes a living extension of Baba House. From ornately decorated shophouses to quiet back lanes, this area reveals how people once lived, worked, and built community.   Fun fact: The famous blue exterior of Baba House was uncovered through paint scraping tests revealing “laundry blue,” a pigment historically used to make white fabrics appear brighter. Conservators chose to preserve this original detail, even though blue was considered inauspicious in Peranakan culture.   Join us as we take the stories beyond the House and into the streets.   Sign up for the Blair Plain Neighbourhood Tour here: https://nus.edu/bhnt01

🎓 Student Research Fellowships — Now Open!   The NUS Museum is launching a new cycle of fellowship programmes for NUS undergraduate and graduate students:   • NUS Museum Student Research Fellowship • Alice & Agnes Tan Student Research Fellowship   Both fellowships offer: ✅ A research stipend ✅ Access to NUS Museum & Baba House collections and archives ✅ A dedicated Museum advisor ✅ Opportunities to engage with the Museum's programmes   Fellows will pursue original research centred on the collections at NUS Museum and NUS Baba House — spanning art, material culture, heritage, and history. This is a unique opportunity to work directly with primary sources and artefacts from the collections.   Deadline: Monday, 18 May 2026, 2359h   For more info, visit: https://bit.ly/3OgwyIm

👀 Looking for a chance to work behind the scenes in a museum? 🗣️ Good news, we've extended the deadline for application to 12 April!   NUS Museum is offering internship opportunities for 8 students keen on exploring museum work across our Curatorial and Outreach units as part of the Vacation Internship Programme. This programme will offer interns research opportunities, professional skills development, mentorship and immersion into the museum and arts industry. This internship is 12 weeks long, from 18 May to 7 August 2026.    Find out more and apply via https://bit.ly/4rzqsQL

🌟 MUSEUM RESEARCH WEEK 2026 - DAY 3 🌟 We've reached the final day of Museum Research Week 2026! Join us for these exciting sessions: 1:00PM | Research Sharing with Ng Zheng Hong Discover the challenges and rewards of being a student docent for Baba House Neighbourhood Tours. 2:00PM |  Resource Library Walkthrough: From Shelf to Window Explore our refreshed Resource Library as a site where books, archives, and curatorial inquiries converge. 3:00PM | Student Research Fellow Sharing: Aw Wei Kang Join Wei Kang in conversation about his research on plantation images in our collections, particularly the Charles Andrew Dyce watercolours, and preview his fieldwork documentation from West Java. 5:00PM | Mobile Museum Display: Interspace Soft Launch Close the week with this special event featuring Project Assistant Aqil Akmal and artist Ong Chan Hao sharing insights into their design and creative processes for our new Mobile Museum! Walk-ins welcome!

🌟 MUSEUM RESEARCH WEEK 2026 - DAY 2 🌟   Quick recap from an amazing Day 1 of Museum Research Week! ✨ Day 2 is happening TODAY—and we’ve got an exciting lineup of engaging conversations, student-led insights, and fresh perspectives on our collections. We’d love to see you there—walk-ins are welcome! 🎉   1:00PM | Course Collaboration Sharing: HY5409 Museums and Museology 2:00PM | Take your pick from either:   Community-Led Tour: Flashes of Memory with student interns Lex Lee and Zoe Zou. or   Student Research Fellow Sharing with Mahima Srindhi Hari   3:00PM | PedTalks is a new discursive programme we discuss how museums function as a pedagogical platform. 3:00PM | Tea Break - Refuel between sessions!   4:00PM | Community-Led Tour: Basking in Slowness With Aida Nadirah

Join us for Museum Research Week 2026! Dates: 24 - 26 Mar 2026, Tues - Thurs Various timeslots Various locations across NUS Museum Register here: https://bit.ly/nusmmrw2026 Museum Research Week is a series of events lined up from 24 to 26 March 2026, presented by NUS Museum, inviting students, academic staff, and the NUS community to explore different modes of research produced through engagement with the Museum’s collections. Throughout the week, the various talks, sharings, and tours will shed light on how students, faculty members, research fellows, and museum staff conduct research on and with objects in the NUS Museum’s collection. See you there!

Led by student intern Aida Nadirah (CHS, Year 4), Basking in Slowness approaches public art through slowness as method, material, and memory. Moving across the NUS campus, the tour considers how public artworks operate within everyday spaces of transit, labour, and study, and how they hold time differently from gallery-based works. Through the tour, participants will also be invited to slow down, notice overlooked details, and reflect on how learning, memory, and belonging unfold gradually within the university environment. Date & Time: 4 Mar, 4pm-5pm Venue: Starts at NUS Museum, ends in UTown Register now at bit.ly/CT_BIS

Conceptualised by student interns Lex Lee (College of Humanities and Sciences (CHS), Year 3) and Zoe Zou (CHS, Year 3), Flashes of Memory approaches archival materials as contingent and subjective practices of remembrance. The tour considers how one may construe the afterlives of a collaboration, performance or exhibition, while exploring archival traces, impulses, and materials that surface within NUS Museum. The tour asks: What is the “archival”? How might we recognise an “archival impulse” in the broad range of materials that document, speculate, or remember? Date & Time: 4 Mar, 2pm-3pm Venue: NUS Museum Register now at bit.ly/CT_FOM

Need a breather? Inspired by NUS Museum's Ng Eng Teng Collection, (EM)body is a guided mindfulness workshop that invites participants to reconnect with their bodies through empathy and gentle awareness. Through body scan and reflective practices, participants are encouraged to notice where tension and pain reside, not as problems to be solved, but as signs of endurance and care. In dialogue with sculptural form, weight, and presence, the workshop reframes the body as a vessel that has held, protected, and carried us through our lives. Date: Wed, 11 Feb Time: 2.40pm - 4.30pm Venue: NUS Museum, Ng Eng Teng: 1+1=1 Gallery Register now at https://nus.edu/4aiFUu2 Organised in collaboration with the NUS Office of Student Affairs

What happens when we encounter the human body in partial forms? In our latest film series Partial Bodies, Whole Worlds, we reflect on how the human body is seen, remembered, and reimagined through fragmentary forms. Taking its cue from artist Ng Eng Teng’s sustained engagement with the figure, the series spanning three sessions, places his work in conversation with other bodily representations across the Museum’s collection and films across the region. In Act 1: Figuring the Body, the series examines how the body is approached as a subject of study, projection, and experimentation. Across different moving-image practices, the films consider the body through multiple modes of figuring, anatomical, observational, speculative, and affective. Date: 4 Feb 2026 Timeslots: 12pm, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, 4pm Find out more and register at bit.ly/PBWW-1

Join us for Museum Open Day 2026 happening today and tomorrow! Wander through the Museum at your own pace with a fun stamp activity, uncover stories behind our collections on a guided tour, or simply unwind with a colouring activity inspired by objects from our collection. Special bonus: Redeem a free merch (while stocks last) when you complete our stamp stations activity! Open to NUS students, staff and alumni only. See you there! Date: 29 & 30 Jan 2026 Time: 12pm - 5pm Venue: NUS Museum, ST Lee Atrium

Keen to create art that lives on our campus? Join this 4-day workshop from 22 to 25 Feb with Malaysia-based artist collective Pangrok Sulap to collaboratively create a woodcut mural design for the wall at Yusof Ishak House. Open to NUS students only. Limited spots available on a first-come, first-served basis. Register now at nus.edu/yih-mural

Ever thought about teaching and learning inside a museum? From ongoing exhibitions to accessing hidden collections, we welcome collaborations for course visits and customised assignments of various themes and learning objectives from an array of disciplines. Take a glimpse of our collaborations this past semester on Instagram here or email us at nusm.education@nus.edu.sg to find out more!

How has the role of university museums evolved amid colonialism, imperialism, and nation-building? In conjunction with the NUS Museum’s 70th year anniversary, Professor Patrick Flores will deliver the fourth instalment of the Anniversary Lecture, titled The University Museum and the Making of the Collective Modern. Find out more and register for the event now at bit.ly/AL2025_NUS.

Good news! The application deadline for the NUS Baba House Vacation Internship Programme is now extended to 9 November 2025! If you’re keen to explore museum work, here’s your chance to get hands-on experience across our Curatorial and Outreach units. In this programme, you’ll get the chance to take on research opportunities, develop professional skills, receive mentorship, and immerse yourself in the museum and heritage industry. Apply now at bit.ly/BH-Internship2025

“As we find ourselves before an artwork and unlock the hinges of our jaw to swallow it whole, the lone body on canvas—a woman, as we quickly identify—, quivers. How is she about to be ingested this time around?” Revisit the final session of Post-Script through Nurul Kaiyisah’s essay, Jemput…Tengok (Welcome…Look). Jemput…Tengok (Welcome…Look) reflects on how the gaze—both cinematic and performative—has shaped representations of women across histories. Structured in two acts, the first examines how the cinematic gaze disciplines and desires through Kirsten Tan’s Fonzi (2006) as well as Yanyun Chen and Sara Chong’s Women in Rage (2019). In the second act, artist Nurul Atiqah Zaidi’s Wanita Minyak (2023–2025) and Wanita Cuci Darah (Women Washing Blood) (2025) reclaim this act of looking through performance, centring the body as a site of labour, endurance, and reclamation. Read the full essay at: nus.edu/46wCAuL

What goes into preserving and retelling the stories of the Peranakan culture and community today? NUS Baba House is offering internship opportunities for 3 students keen on exploring museum work across our Curatorial and Outreach units as part of the Vacation Internship Programme. This programme will offer interns research opportunities, professional skills development, mentorship and immersion into the museum and heritage industry. Applications close on 31 Oct. Register now at bit.ly/BH-Internship2025

🏺 The exhibition “Continuity, Persistence, Line” Thinking Through Clay – A Selection of Works by Delia Prvački has been extended to 31 March 2026! Don’t miss this chance to see Prvački’s multi-layered, expansive and experimental artistic practice, focusing on her work with ceramics. Presented in three segments titled ”The Search”, ” The Unknown” and ”The Impulse”, the exhibition at NX1 Gallery offers a glimpse into the often unseen process behind an artist’s final works, the genealogy of Prvački’s exploration and attempts to describe the intangible through ceramic sculptures, and installations intimately tied to her life experiences and motivations that shape and persist in her practice. Visit museum.nus.edu.sg to plan your visit today!