2024’s Light to Night Singapore festival, Reimagine, spearheaded by National Gallery Singapore, invites visitors to engage with art and space in new and innovative ways, which spark creativity and encourage reflection. Visitors will be taken on a journey through immersive and interactive experiences, each taking inspiration from our nation’s history and artworks from the National Collection.

Wings of Change by Kumari Nahappan features an enormous saga seed, an object that has endless possibilities. Nahappan’s luminescent saga seed symbolizes energy and hope. Her artwork draws attention to the saga tree, whose population has declined over the years. It speaks of the urgent need for preservation, conservation and sustainability in today’s world, particularly in the context of climate change. Next to the seed is a pod, a massive reservoir of energy that is waiting to be harnessed, standing as a powerful endorsement for climate action and reminding festivalgoers of their role as stewards of the planet.

A Project of Art in the Night Race.
The new life of the floodlights.

A collective Upcycled Art Exhibition curated by Nadia Stefanel with 10 artists based in Singapore at The Arts House. From the urgency of pondering on environmental sustainability they have given a new life to the floodlights that illuminated the Formula 1 Night Race. This year with a mission to accelerate sustainable human progress, DZ Engineering SRL, a subsidiary of Dino Zoli Group, provides the lighting for the Formula 1 Night Race with a massive replacement of their floodlights, using sustainable LED lights for the upcoming 2023 Singapore Grand Prix.

In conjunction with the 2023 Race Week in Singapore, Kumari Nahappan’s ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ takes us back to our roots with an incredible array of seeds. These seeds serve as poignant reminders of our natural environment, boundles potential for new life. Each seed’ss outer surface acts as a metaphor, often appearing strangely peculiar yet capable of evolving into plants that exude unparalleled elegance. Among them, the 18-faced Rudraksha seed holds significance as a sacred item used by Hindus and Buddhists in prayer. Conversely, the rubber seed symbolises humanity’s dependence, producing essential daily necessities.

With a curious call to explore, the Cabinet of Curiosities is ingeniously crafted from repurposed floodlights, which previously illuminated 15
editions of the Grand Prix. This transformation breathes new life into these objects, inviting viewers to retrace the journey of life’s beginnings. Immerse yourself in this captivating world of seeds and rediscover the allure of nature within Kumari Nahappan’s extraordinary creation.

The Private Museum (TPM) Singapore is pleased to present a solo exhibition surveying prominent Singaporean artist Kumari Nahappan’s
three-decade-long artistic practice, curated by John Z.W. Tung. This showcase will be the first of the museum’s upcoming line-up of programmes at its new premise, featuring over 50 works which include Nahappan’s monumental site-specific installations, paintings and
sculptures, some of which are re-creations of past iterations that have not been seen by the public since the mid-1990s.

Inspired by the Hindu cosmological notion of cyclical time, organises the artworks not chronologically but by colour, allowing visitors to witness the diverse yet interconnected nature of Nahappan's practice. Nature, rituals, time and space are themes that have long been part of Nahappan’s works and are also encapsulated throughout the exhibition. Each intimate space reflects specific colours that take prominence at various periods of Nahappan’s practice, representative of a diversity of themes and a recurrence of Nahappan’s interests over an expanse of time.

Characterised by constant evolution, Nahappan’s varied employment of materiality from organic matter to man-made structures and found objects breathes new life into her pieces, allowing them to transcend two-dimensional visuality and engage with the senses on multiple levels. Immersing in Nahappan’s fields of colour, allows visitors to contend with the existence of these countless universes and their cycles.