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 – at once expressive, intimate, and pared down – the series spanning three sessions, places his work in conversation with other bodily representations across the Museum’s collection and films across the region.

Act 1: Figuring the Body

This first act of 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.

Rather than presenting the body as a stable or coherent whole, these works treat it as something to be examined, reimagined, and reassembled. The body appears as structure and surface, as a site of sensation and memory, and as a space shaped by lived experience. Shifting between analytical and intuitive approaches, the films foreground the processes through which bodies are known, interpreted, and continually re-figured.

About the Series

Through the moving image, the series considers how fragments of the body can carry emotional, social, and imaginative weight. Across three sessions, each screening invites audiences to encounter the partial figure not as something lacking, but as a site of possibility – where presence is felt through what is incomplete, and where every part opens onto a wider world.