Night Festival at the National Museum

Last Saturday night, as we were driving home, we stumbled onto a bustling Bras Basah area, which was in the midst of the Night Festival.

Usually, this area of the City is a rather quiet stretch in the middle of the night…But at 10pm of that Saturday – It was a Totally Different City.

Conceived, curated by Ong Keng Sen and produced by TheatreWorks, the City was transformed to a walk down Memory Lane.

The festival stretched from the Singapore Management Uni, Singapore Art Museum, Peranakan Museum and the Substation. Through the festivities, along the whole stretch, one was brought to a world of Amusement Parks.

Naturally with an artistic outlook to the festival, you were not going to find Amusement Park rides or games, but instead we got amusement from a different perspective.

Check it out:

World’s Slowest SMS Billboard

In front of the Singapore Art Museum, this is a tongue-in-cheek interactive artwork where messages sent were displayed by a team of humans with giant billboards. From advertisements about One’s facebook account, we were asked to smile at our neighbours or Do the chicken dance. Quite Amusing!

The streets across the SAM to the National Museum were also lined with murals and graffiti art. Many people took the time to pause, and to cam-whore.

Renowned Street artist Tyke Witness AWR and EL Mac were also there to paint live. It is interesting to see up close how Graffiti Art is conceived and done-up. They are definitely Artistic, as the Artwork was very intricately drawn.

I asked my wife whether One was a Swiss and the Other was a Brit! 🙂

Don’t worry…there were no MRT trains around.

There were also these 6 gigantic Satellite dishes outside the National Museum. There were actually people dancing underneath, but it was a bit too crowded for me to get any closer.

Abusment Park

We also managed to walk into the Singapore Art Museum courtyard which was transformed into a courtyard of torture. The irony was that there were many stalls stationed around, but the amusement that they sold was torture.

Armed with their own guillotine, they were ready to torture the sporting tourists who were willing to be the victims of the Courtyard.

We lined up to see the underground torture instruments but the queue took so long, that when we reached the door, it was already 2am.

I would say that the festival is really quite a success, as I saw adults and children walking around up to the wee hours of the morning. There were deep artistic connotations and parodies to the performances.