The Strange Archive treats the archive as a provisional and reflexive space shaped not only by care, continuity, and labour, but also by desire, silence, and the unresolved ambiguities that permeate every act of remembering. Forgotten stories, unrealised projects, and obscured memories return not as authoritative truths but as fragments that invite re-reading, mis-reading, and lingering.

The exhibition is situated within the industrial corridors of Tanjong Pagar Distripark, a place defined by movement, labour, arrival, departure, and the circulation of goods. This setting mirrors the archive as something perpetually in motion. Pierre Nora has suggested that memory becomes designed the moment it ceases to be lived directly, leaving behind monuments, museums, and official histories as its traces. In contrast, The Strange Archive resists closure. It keeps the archive open as something unfinished and intimate, a structure through which new encounters and interpretations may continue to emerge.

The spatial language of the exhibition draws upon Céline Condorelli’s notion of “support structures”, which treats architectural and material elements as active participants in meaning-making rather than as a neutral audience. Hinges, windows, lighting, soil, sand, charcoal, and the unevenness of the floor are not passive fixtures but collaborators in shaping how viewers encounter the works. Walls, floors, texts, sounds, and smells become supports for artworks and provocations, inviting audiences to move through a strange and out-of-sorts library of oral, aural, tactile, atmospheric, and visual registers of memory. These materials underscore the fact that archives are constructed from things that deteriorate, erode, and shift over time, and they remind us that no archive is ever complete nor entirely truthful.