WOULD you like a quick summary of the 700-year history of Singapore – one that extends farther back than the arrival of Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 and into the 13th and 14th centuries? Would you like it even more if we told you that the story would unfold in just six minutes, through a cascade of sound and images dancing across the facade of the National Museum of Singapore (NMS)?

The Singapore Night Festival 2023 is returning from Aug 18 to Aug 26, and one of its highlights is 700 years, an ambitious large-scale video work narrating the story of Singapore through the eyes of a female protagonist. It runs on a loop every night from 7.30 pm to midnight on the museum’s exterior. And it is the creation of playwright Zizi Majid and digital artists Muhammad Izdi and Jeremie Bellot (of multimedia agency AV Extended).

Zizi is a Singaporean playwright teaching drama and writing at Syracuse University in New York. Back here temporarily to work on the project, she says: “Women are frequently erased from the annals of history. So in this story, I’ve created a fictitious female character belonging to a royal family in 13th-century Temasek who gains the ability to see into the future. She leaps across time, lands in critical junctures and interacts with Sang Nila Utama, Sir Stamford Raffles and other figures critical to the making of Singapore as a port city.”