i Light Marina Bay 2017 promises a spectacular showcase of light art installations that will illuminate the Marina Bay waterfront promenade. From 3 to 26 March, visitors can enjoy 20 stunning artworks designed by local and international artists. Beyond the light art installations, this year’s festival will feature a greater variety of community-centric activities that will give the public opportunities to participate directly and contribute to community causes.
Organised by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), the fifth edition of Asia’s leading sustainable light art festival will feature three distinct festival hubs – Art-Zoo for imaginative play, The Fantastical World of eco.me for sustainability-themed activities and Gastrobeats for food and music.
Art-Zoo, a festival hub at The Float @ Marina Bay, will house 11 larger-than-life inflatable art installations in a giant play-garden. From plants, animals, to ecosystems that represent different letters of the alphabet, Art-Zoo explores nature through the perspective of art in an imaginative landscape. From manoeuvring through a Giraffe maze to walking through the belly of a Whale or taking pictures with a towering Spider, this interactive and visual adventure promises great fun for the young and the young-at-heart while learning more about wildlife and creating a sustainable world.
Art-Zoo creator and Creative Director of local multi-disciplinary creative agency BLACK, Mr Jackson Tan, said, “With Art-Zoo, we want to recreate fond childhood memories of visiting the Singapore Zoo with our families, but adding a twist by bringing the zoo into the city, and combining it with the concept of an art gallery. We hope that through these interactive installations, visitors will be able to learn about nature and environmental sustainability in a fun and engaging way.”
Visitors to Art-Zoo can also do their part for charity with part of proceeds going to beneficiaries from Students Care Service and Focus on the Family Singapore. Ticketing details on Art-Zoo can be found on www.artzoo.sg.
The second festival hub, The Fantastical World of eco.me, will present a myriad of sustainability-themed activities at The Promontory @ Marina Bay. With highlights such as a recycling and upcycling marketplace, a kinetic energy playground and urban farming showcases, the public can explore and discover something new about environmental sustainability at the hub from 3 to 5 March and 9 to 12 March.
After the festival, the upcycled furniture at the hub – comprising 70 tables and 80 benches – made of wooden pallets, as well as 300 colourful planters made of painted beer crates, will be made available for public adoption to minimise wastage. Donations will go towards the Culture Plus Fund managed by Global Cultural Alliance Ltd.
The festival also welcomes visitors to bask in music, food and fun at the third festival hub, Gastrobeats. The public can patronise Gastrobeats – held at the Bayfront Event Space – to grab gastronomic delights from food artisans, indulge in some old-school fun with carnival rides, as well as put on their dancing shoes for a night of Silent Disco where participants wear wireless noise-cancelling headphones to enjoy live-streamed music of their choice at the Marina Bay City Gallery.
Linking the festival hubs together is a necklace of 20 light art installations, curated to the theme “Light & Nature”, lining the Marina Bay waterfront promenade. Designed by artists from nine countries, including Singapore, the light art installations are created with energy-saving lighting or environmentally-friendly materials to serve as reminders of the importance of sustainable habits and to reinforce Marina Bay’s position as a sustainable precinct.
MoonFlower by Lee Yun Qin (Singapore)
For the first time, festival goers can give an installation a second lease of life after the festival by bringing it home. Local artist Lee Yun Qin will be offering some 800 intricate stalks from her work, MoonFlower, for public adoption. Made of wire mesh and lit with a solar-powered LED bulb, each moonflower can be adopted at a minimum of $5 with all proceeds going towards the Garden City Fund. The public can adopt the moonflowers on https://pozible.com/project/moonflower-i-light-marina-bay and collect the moonflowers after the festival period.
Festival Director and Director (Place Management) of URA, Mr Jason Chen, said “We are happy to have the support of many festival partners and sponsors to create multiple touchpoints where visitors can consider environmental sustainability from different perspectives. Beyond the sensory experience i Light Marina Bay has always offered, the festival this year will see a stronger emphasis on interactivity with the line-up of activities in the festival hubs and opportunities for visitors to contribute to meaningful causes. With the festival taking place over three weeks at Marina Bay, the public can take their time to explore and discover something new with their family and friends. Beyond the festival, we hope festival goers will remember our sustainability message and adopt more sustainable habits.”
Other programmes during this year’s festival for the community to pledge their support include the annual Switch Off, Turn Up campaign that will see participating buildings and organisations switch off non-essential lighting and turn up air-conditioning temperatures throughout the festival period. The resulting energy savings will help to offset the power consumption of the light art installations at the festival.
To further encourage the public to adopt sustainable habits, the festival will switch off the light art installations and join the rest of Singapore in the one-hour lights out event during Earth Hour on 25 March, 8.30pm to 9.30pm.
Festival goers can also participate in other complementary partner programmes, such as exchanging their incandescent light bulbs for energy-saving LED bulbs through Philips Lighting’s Gift of Light LED light bulb exchange programme.
Refer to Annex A [PDF, 310kb] for more information on the festival hubs and partner programmes, and Annex B [PDF, 1.29MB] for details of the light art installations that will be exhibited at i Light Marina Bay 2017.
i Light Marina Bay will open from 3 to 26 March 2017, 7.30pm to 11pm daily with an extension to 12.00mn on Fridays and Saturdays, around the Marina Bay waterfront promenade. Admission is free. Visit www.ilightmarinabay.sg for more information.