Singapore Night Festival 2018 – Lighting up the Bras Basah.Bugis Precinct

This weekend, the annual Singapore Night Festival has returned for its 11th edition. While not yet in full swing, with live performances and a festival village set to premiere next week, all fourteen of its night light exhibitions have already gone up, ready for hungry cameras begging for a shot of these illuminated artworks. Here’s some artworks to look forward to:

As with just about every light festival these days, one of the biggest draws this year is set to be a projection mapping artwork. Created by French artists Arnaud Pottier and Thimothee Mironneau, Odyssey was inspired by the ongoing Imaginarium exhibition at SAM @ 8Q, and takes viewers on a five minute journey across time and space, as the facade of the Singapore Art Museum becomes a portal to the cosmos, playing with speed, perspective and depth using trippy, abstract imagery.

Around the National Museum, visitors can take a trip into the ocean with Lekke Design and Auditoire’s Aquatic Dream at the lawn. Here, visitors will be delighted by floating schools of fish and jellyfish softly swaying in the wind, as machines produce smoke and bubbles to create a surreal, underwater environment to be explored.

Take a short walk over to the Armenian Church and you’ll find its grounds transformed into a playground with a rainbow canopy. Titled Pulse, artists Galina Mihaleva, Hedren Sum, Pat Patanutaporn, Kathrin Albers and Audrey Ng allow visitors to transform this artwork with their own presence as the lights and sounds ebb and shift according to how loudly one might speak to it, or one’s proximity. In addition, there will be a real life dancer present to do live performance inspired by the changes in display.

Over at CHIJMES, look out for Pierre Ranzaini and Cristina Di Pasqual’s Before The Word, an illuminated, literal pile of letters of the alphabet that visitors can interact with and activate – upon playing with a control panel, the installation will change its lights, and play words inspired by the city.

This year, the festival has extended its reach wider than ever, with artworks stretching to as far as Raffles City to the National Design Centre to The Cathay, with one of the highlights being Teng Kai Wei’s Leap of Faith, inspired by the artist’s own risk to move to the art world from an accounting background, as the structure lights up with words of encouragement when visitors interact with it.

The Night Festival will begin in full with the Festival Village at SMU Campus Green and live performances will begin come 23rd – 25th August. But for now, if you have a spare evening out, explore the Bras Basah.Bugis Precinct with friends and family, and see the place in a brand new light, just for a week.

Singapore Night Festival 2018 runs from 17th – 25th August around the Bras Basah.Bugis Precinct. Admission is free, for more information and full lineup, visit the website here