Voilah! France Singapore Festival 2025: Spotlight on visual arts

The programme includes a photo exhibition by home-grown photographer Melisa Teo and a collaboration with Gardens by the Bay

- Clement Yong

Singapore artists' takes on France and, conversely, French artists' impressions of the city-state, will occupy centre stage at the Voilah! France Singapore Festival 2025, which returns from April 23 to June 8.

Continuing the previous edition's focus on arts and culture, Voilah! 2025 has a heavy emphasis on the visual arts. This includes major National Gallery Singapore survey City Of Others: Asian Artists In Paris, 1920s-1940s and a photography exhibition by Singaporean Melisa Teo along Anderson Bridge.

Titled Two Rivers, Teo's show—sited in a public avenue with heavy footfall—is a visual dialogue of Paris' Seine river and the Singapore River—dual water bodies that have shaped the artist. The graduate of the National University of Singapore and the Sorbonne University in Paris says photographing the Seine, which always appears new with the seasons, prompted her to also direct her lens at the Singapore River. "It struck me that I had never photographed my own country. What about my own river? I live right next to it."

Another intercultural show, City SingaPOP, will be at the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, featuring more than 70 works by Singapore-based French graphic designer and photographer Nicolas Damiens.