After previously taking on lofty subject matters such as utopia (in the exhibition After Utopia) and notions of peace, justice, equality, democracy and progress (in its excellent ongoing SG50 show 5 Stars), the Singapore Art Museum counts down the days with a final show for the year, which looks at time.

Titled Time Of Others, the travelling exhibition done in collaboration with museums in Tokyo, Osaka and Queensland comprises works by 17 artists that examine the concept of time in relation to people.

The awkwardly phrased title aside, there’s a certain slipperiness to the show that makes it somewhat hard to grasp as a whole. There are, for example, interesting works that seemingly operate on complex, different wavelengths, such as Hong Kong artist Tozer Pak’s “dark room” of photographs of Malaysia, which plays on one’s perception of travel, and Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong’s conceptually playful piece Give More Than You Take, which involves 549kg worth of newspapers.

But there are also certain works that form a dialogue with one another.

On the one hand, there are those that reveal glimpses of various kinds of “others”, a spectrum of “that which is not us”, whether these pertain to spaces, histories or peoples.

Indonesian Saleh Husein’s Arabian Party, for instance, peels back the curtain on the history of his country’s comparatively invisible Arab migrants. Through a series of monochromatic paintings of faces and objects based on images from rare and old photographs, Husein revives their presence, albeit in fragments. There is a political edge reflected in his project, particularly its historical background: During the 1930s came the rise of the Arab-Indonesian nationalist movement, when the country was still under Dutch rule.

Taking the opposite tact in her critique of political subjugation is Filipino artist Kiri Dalena. In photographs of anti-government rallies, she erases the slogans seen on placards carried by protesters (including those against the Philippines’ late dictator Ferdinand Marcos) and compiles them into a thick, unopened tome that mimics the Little Red Book used by Mao Zedong and China’s Communist Party during its Cultural Revolution

There’s also a particularly poignant and poetic video by Cambodian Vandy Rattana that sees him relating a journey in remembrance of the victims who fell during the harsh rule of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia back in the late 1970s.

Alongside issues of erased histories are those of symbolic structures: Taiwanese Chen Chieh-jen’s video installation looks at the destruction of a sanitorium for lepers in the name of progress (even as the building in question also had, during the 1930s, a less-than-rosy history of oppression under the Japanese colonial government). Meanwhile, Japan’s Shitamichi Motoyuki’s torii series of photographs features these old Shinto temple gates which were constructed during World War II but found in the unlikeliest places outside of Japan: In the wilderness, transformed into unofficial park benches, or simply overrun with weeds, their function forgotten.

In these works, time seemingly acts as backdrop and context to examples of otherness. But another set of works have more to do with the former and less with the latter.

The painstaking, almost stubborn, act of cataloguing is the thread that ties together projects on books, calendars and dates. The exhibition’s biggest name, the late Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, is represented by two examples from his seminal series comprising paintings of dates he did until the time of his death, called TODAY. In these paintings, the dates themselves acquire a special aura unto themselves and one is also reminded of the artist’s project as a personal kind of performance across time.

From dates, one moves on to Singapore’s Heman Chong’s first-rate installation Calendars (2020-2096), which is given an airing once more. A project seven years in the making, it comprises imagined calendars for the future hinging on the images of stark empty spaces across Singapore.

While Chong has described his project as a kind of novel-by-imagery, Filipino artist Ringo Bunoan goes the literal (and literary) route with works that play on the endings of books. Stacked up to the ceiling are books she previously collected and from which she has torn out the final page with the word “The End”. These find their way in another section, where she assembles all these final pages and presents them side-by-side.

Together, the two pieces form a loop, undermining the very idea of endings — a fitting finale to SAM’s final show for the year.

Time Of Others opens today and runs until Feb 28 at the Singapore Art Museum. For more info, visit http://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg