Calling all curious minds! Are you passionate about art, visual culture, and museum practice?

Museum Lab is your gateway to understanding the foundations of seeing, displaying and sharing art in fresh and critical ways. This year’s theme centres on the Cabinet of Curiosities—a historical form of collecting that flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emerging from the intersections of travel, trade, and early colonial encounters. Often eclectic and non-specialised, these cabinets were less about systematic taxonomy and more about the imaginative ordering of the world, shaped by personal curiosity and cultural projection. As precursors to the modern museum, they not only reflected an early impulse to gather and display but also exposed the entangled politics of knowledge production, ownership, and wonder.

Revisiting the cabinet through contemporary curatorial frameworks offers fertile ground for critical reflection. It invites us to question how systems of classification, spectacle, and authority persist in institutional practices, and how they might be reimagined. When viewed through the lens of archival theory, the cabinet becomes not merely a container of objects, but a structure animated by desire, absence, and the compulsion to preserve. In this sense, the cabinet aligns with the post-critical museological turn: privileging the fragmentary, the contingent, and the polysemous over the definitive and the didactic.

From 24 June to 11 July 2025, across six sessions, through workshops, field trips and guest lectures, Museum Lab participants will engage with the cabinet as both metaphor and method, opening possibilities for curatorial practices that are speculative, dialogic, and responsive, while foregrounding the affective and epistemological dimensions of collecting, and the complex temporalities that underpin both archives and exhibitions.

The programme will culminate in the opportunity to develop and present a proposal for a curatorial or programmatic intervention at NUS Museum.

Application Deadline: 11 June 2025

Confirmation of Candidates: 16 June 2025

Places are limited, so submit your registration soon!

APPLY NOW

Designed to provide participants with foundational knowledge and practical skills, Museum Lab fosters critical engagement with art, heritage, and exhibition-making. Through a structured series of lectures, workshops, and discussions led by artists, curators and practitioners, participants will engage with a range of perspectives and methodologies. Each iteration of Museum Lab will culminate in a curatorial exercise, where participants apply their learning by developing proposals for exhibitions, public programmes, or interpretive materials. This programme is organised by NUS Museum and supported by the Cultural Matching Fund (2024-2026).

Still curious about Museum Lab? Click here to read more about last year’s programme and what former participants thought of the experience.