Singapore Night Festival 2026 features Isaiah Cacnio’s ‘Traces’

The Cathay also becomes a centre of regional digital artistry by hosting the inaugural MALAM Projection Mapping Competition. Supported by official technology partner Epson, the competition showcases the work of emerging Southeast Asian artists, students, and collectives. The top 20 entries are projected onto the historic building’s facade during the first week of the festival, with the top five remaining as staple installations throughout the rest of the run.

Armenian Street and the Peranakan Museum served as another major zone of cultural activity, hosting the elsewhere at Armenian Street programme with extended museum hours until 10pm and free entry on select weekend nights. The street itself was closed to traffic, transforming into The Other Night—a mystical, cashless marketplace operated in collaboration with creative collective Wormhole and Friends. Here, festivalgoers browsed curious artisan wares, encountered fortune tellers, and interacted with wandering storytellers after dark.

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On the street, the Peranakan Museum’s The Somewhere Else Stage hosts a diverse, genre-crossing lineup of regional musicians, dancers, and theatrical acts. The musical offerings range from the traditional to the contemporary:

On August 28, the stage opens with Kelana Purba, a pioneering Singaporean Dikir Barat group celebrating 36 years of cultural heritage, followed by the community-driven, live-improvised musical platform Off The Record . The evening concludes with HAIYOH! Supernatural Confessions with Eugene Tay, where the STB-licensed dark tourism guide and Peranakan researcher shared localised paranormal folklore. On August 29, the stage welcomes self-taught bedroom-pop and soft-rock artist Shye, followed by the traditional Arabic covers of The Samrah Club. On September 4, the 162-year-old Lao Sai Tao Yuan Teochew Opera Troupe presents Journey to the West, a Teochew opera performance led by Nick Shen of Tok Tok Chiang. The stage wraps up on September 5 with sound art project NADA, followed by the Yogyakarta-based Papermoon Puppet Theatre presenting their work MARACOSA.

The Peranakan Museum also expands its sensory programming into the culinary and theatrical spheres. In the Ixora Room, Sufra Nights: A Culinary Experience brings participants together for a communal dinner and explores the heritage of Singapore’s Arab Peranakan community through traditional Arab hospitality, music, and interactive dance, presented alongside illusions by corporate comedy magician Aman Alhamid. Meanwhile, the museum’s galleries come alive during Step into the Wayang with Gunong Sayang, where performers lead visitors on a musical and theatrical journey through Peranakan heritage. For those seeking a hands-on experience, Fantasy Boutique: A Wearable Workshop by GLITTER offers a creative space where participants can craft embellished eyewear inspired by Southeast Asian myths.

At the SMU Campus Green, the focus shifts to a highly contemplative and technically complex installation by Filipino motion graphics artist and multimedia engineer Isaiah Cacnio. Titled Traces, his digital projection-mapping installation focuses on the deep historical mystery of the Singapore Stone—a massive, ancient slab covered in undeciphered script that was blown up into several fragments during the British colonial era, leaving only a single fragment preserved.

Cacnio, who was invited to participate in the Singapore Night Festival after speaking at the ASEAN Light Network conference the previous year, sought to build a bridge between the physical and the digital. His installation utilises abstract, fractal-inspired projections that flow down the massive branches of SMU’s century-old Bodhi tree and cascade into the sunken amphitheatre.

Cacnio shares with Tatler his fascination with the historic artefact: “For me, the whole thing about the work is the mystery in the history. That’s the whole thing for me. The Singapore Stone is part of their history; it’s being taught in class, as I asked the founders about it, but it’s still mysterious in itself.”

He also notes a fascinating connection to his own home country. “Although for us, the writings in the Laguna Copperplate can be read and have already been deciphered, for the Singapore Stone, it’s just a fragment of whatever was left of it.”

Cacnio’s technical background in engineering plays a direct role in how he shapes his installations, allowing him to balance mathematical precision with artistic intuition. However, his artistic focus remains rooted in the human element, seeing immersive public art as a vital tool for making modern metropolitan spaces feel more intimate.

“Public art is very essential to any space because it makes it more human,” Cacnio observes. “Buildings are artificial, rigid, and cold in that way, and it’s just not inviting. For us Asians, we want that kind of spice in our lives, that colour that makes us us. Creating things—not just buildings—is at our very core [as humans]... Building those spaces that relate to us.”

Designing a nocturnal, outdoor work on such a large scale presented unique challenges, requiring Cacnio to work around the natural variations of the garden’s trees without a formal floor plan at the start of the project. “What I have learnt in the process of joining here is that you integrate that experience into the story of the work too,” he reflects. “During the day, it might look different compared to seeing it at night. How do you translate that so it comes alive or takes on a different dimension? This participation helped me improve in my craft of storytelling.”

Beyond large-scale public festivals, Cacnio has also successfully introduced his projection art to private collectors. By integrating custom digital projections with smaller physical sculptures, he has opened new avenues for private art commissions, citing a prominent Filipino banker in Singapore who is a notable collector of the renowned teamLab art collective.

Cacnio hopes that his work at the Singapore Night Festival will inspire other Filipino artists to explore the boundaries of projection mapping and participate in future editions. “We’ve been doing this in the Philippines, not really as a festival, but projection mapping in some of our local provinces already,” Cacnio shares, noting the high demand for his projection mapping workshops. “We have the capacity, we have the audience, it’s more of convincing people to mount a festival as big as this. There is a lot of interest in this kind of art from people, whether through institutional commissions or private collections... Soon, there will be other projection mapping artists in the Philippines who will start it and join here in the Singapore Night Festival.”

Through its diverse showcase of regional talent, collaborative programming, and public art installations, the Singapore Night Festival demonstrates how creative storytelling can transform familiar urban spaces into interactive environments of shared cultural memory.

The Singapore Night Festival runs from August 21 to September 5, with free admission to most of the public installations and exhibition zones.

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