Nine days, over 40 programmes, and about four in five of them free. 1–9 August 2026, on the theme "Beyond Boundaries".
The 2026 festival has ended — but one exhibition is still open. Everything else below is the full 2026 programme, kept as a record of what ran.
Cultprint
To 4 October · Friday to Sunday, 12pm – 7pmOpen today
That one is open today. Dates read from the festival's own listings on 15 August 2026. Also on in Penang right now: the rest of the Penang festival calendar.
George Town Festival began in 2010 to mark the city's UNESCO World Heritage listing, and it has run every year since. It is not a street party and not a single ticketed season — it is a nine-day programme of theatre, dance, music, film and visual art that treats the heritage zone itself as the venue. Clan houses, a disused colonial bank building, a former bus depot and the padang all become stages.
The 2026 edition — the 17th — carries the theme Beyond Boundaries, and the organisers put artists from ten countries into it: Italy, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Malaysia among them. Seven productions are ticketed. The festival says over 80% of what it puts on is free, and that holds up against the listings.
For a visitor the practical shape is this: the opening weekend and closing weekend are the two big free moments, the projection work runs on weeknights in between, and the exhibitions sit open all week for anyone who wants to wander in. You can have a full festival day without buying a ticket at all.
George Town Festival 2026 ran from 1 to 9 August 2026 — nine days, not a month. It was the 17th edition, on the theme "Beyond Boundaries". Opening weekend was 1–2 August at Padang Kota Lama; the closing weekend, 8–9 August, was the CTRL A+C street programme. Four exhibitions outlast the festival: Artisan II and Collodion, Silver, Glass to 30 August, Converge to 31 August, and The Natural History Museum of Yeahnahnesia to 4 October.
Mostly, yes. The festival states that over 80% of the programme is free to attend. Seven of the productions are ticketed theatre and music. Everything else — the opening weekend, the TERANG projections, the CTRL A+C street works, the exhibitions, the film programme and the board games festival — is free to walk into.
Ticketed shows in 2026 ran from RM48 to RM80 a seat, with group-of-four bundles at RM192 to RM256. Dream Space was RM48/RM60, When Spirits Meet RM48 to RM80, and Lament of the Wandering Head and DESDEMONA RM64/RM80. The festival also offers 20% off for groups of four and 20% concession for seniors, students and patrons with disabilities on presentation of ID at entry.
Through the box office at georgetownfestival.com, which sends you to CloudJoi for each individual show. Tickets went on sale 10 June 2026. Popular shows do sell out — Lament of the Wandering Head was sold out for both performances and DESDEMONA was almost full when we checked on 6 August 2026.
Three anchor it. SIX TO ELEVEN opens the festival on 1–2 August at Padang Kota Lama with Alena Murang, At Adau and the German DUNDU light puppets. TERANG | Heritage in Motion projects onto heritage facades around Armenian Street from 3 to 7 August, 8pm to 10.30pm. CTRL A+C closes it on 8–9 August with street performances across the city.
Across the UNESCO heritage zone and a few venues beyond it. Padang Kota Lama, Armenian Street, Dewan Sri Pinang, Bangunan U.A.B, Majestic Theatre, Loft 29, The Courtyard on Beach Street, The Whiteaways Arcade, Seh Tek Tong Cheah Kongsi, Hin Bus Depot and Cultprint all host programmes. Most sit within comfortable walking distance of each other in the heritage core.
Yes. Dream Space is non-verbal and made for all ages, Steamplant Movement is wordless street theatre aimed at passers-by of any age, and the Asian Board Games Festival is free to enter and play. The heavier ticketed works carry age guidance — DESDEMONA is 15 and above, Lament of the Wandering Head is 12 and above.
Penang Puppet Festival returns 12–23 August 2026 with its third edition, BERBUNGA, opening with a gathering of Hokkien glove puppetry (potehi) troupes from Penang, Jakarta, Singapore, Taipei and Zhangzhou. The Hungry Ghost Festival also falls in August. And four George Town Festival exhibitions stay open past 9 August — Artisan II at O Sculpture Art Space and Collodion, Silver, Glass at Hikayat both to 30 August, Converge at Taman Kejiranan Macallum to 31 August, and The Natural History Museum of Yeahnahnesia at Cultprint, which reopened on 14 August and runs to 4 October.
These are the paid productions. Everything else in the festival is free. Prices and times below were taken from the official box office and the CloudJoi ticket pages on 6 August 2026.
The troupe’s 35th anniversary production: a post-apocalyptic fable in which the sun no longer reliably rises, and humanity has to reckon with what it neglected.
Physical theatre on bullying in Malaysian schools and workplaces. Nominated seven times at the 2025 BOH Cameronian Arts Awards and winner of Best Group/Ensemble Performance (Theatre).
Three of Malaysia’s finest jazz vocalists work through the Great Malaysian Songbook — standards and originals in Malay, Chinese and English, carried on swing, bebop and soul.
A female-led work built on the flying-head spirit of Southeast Asian folklore, reworking the myth into a reflection on migration and the fractured histories of the Chinese diaspora. Taiwanese percussion meets Southeast Asian gongs and ritual chant.
Giant whales glide through the air and folklore turns into landscape in this wordless puppet and physical-theatre piece. Sold out at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; this is its Malaysian debut.
The living traditions of Taiwan’s Truku and Amis peoples — the Truku’s "Hakaw Utux" or Rainbow Bridge, and the Amis harvest songs and dances of Makota’ay — staged as an encounter between mountain and sea.
Othello retold from Desdemona’s side, through the ritual and movement of 14th-century Japanese Noh. She gets an afterlife in which to confront her fate on her own terms.
Dream Space is the pick of the ticketed programme if you have children or no Malay, Mandarin or Hokkien: it is entirely wordless, forty minutes, and it sold out at the Edinburgh Fringe before coming here.
Key art © George Town Festival, used to illustrate its own programme — official listing
Availability moves fast in the final days. When we checked on 6 August 2026, Lament of the Wandering Head was sold out for both performances and DESDEMONA was marked almost full. Booking pages are the only reliable source — the links above go straight to them.
Over 80% of the programme costs nothing. These are the free events with the most behind them — no booking, no ticket, just turn up.
The closing weekend, CTRL A+C, runs six works out on the streets: Beyond Borders, LOS | Kembali, Steamplant Movement, Nenda: Fruit in Palm, Click Click and Fence. All free, all in public space.
Key art © George Town Festival, used to illustrate its own programme — official listing
The opening: five hours a night of music, light and movement on the padang. Sarawakian musician Alena Murang, indigenous collective At Adau, and the five-metre DUNDU illuminated puppets from Germany.
Padang Kota Lama
6pm – 11pm
Heritage facades turned into screens, on the theme "Pasar" — the market as a place where cultures and stories are exchanged. Drawn from 125 submissions across eight countries.
Around Armenian Street
8pm – 10.30pm
The closing programme takes the festival out of the theatre entirely: site-responsive theatre, movement and street performance in streets, parks and squares, where passers-by end up part of the work.
Armenian Street, Armenian Park and public spaces
Through the day, from 10am
Six wandering survivors search a post-collapse steampunk world for a single seed. Wordless street theatre from Italy’s Shedan Theater — built for all ages and for people who just happen to be walking past.
Armenian Street
10am & 5pm
An exchange with the Ansan Street Arts Festival, one of South Korea’s leading outdoor performing arts festivals. Includes "An Old House" and "Dokkaebi’s Dream Site", a contemporary dance piece that reimagines the Korean goblin as a symbol of housing insecurity.
Public spaces across George Town
Afternoon and evening slots from 4pm
Third Malaysian edition. Free entry and free play across 40 exhibitor booths from 10 countries, plus a tournament run by local game store Kohii. A RM10 Play Passport and RM5 Stamp Hunter Pass are optional add-ons.
1st Avenue Mall
A curated programme of independent films, documentaries and animation from Malaysia and across Asia, several with post-screening Q&As. Screenings run in Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mandarin, Hokkien and Tamil.
Seh Tek Tong Cheah Kongsi and other heritage venues
Ten local cafés built festival menus, "city-pulse" drinks and one-off bakes around the Beyond Boundaries theme. The easiest way to touch the festival without booking anything.
10 cafés across George Town
Fifteen venues across the heritage core and just south of it. Fourteen of them are within about a quarter of an hour's walk of Armenian Street, and four — Blank Canvas, Cultprint, Cheah Kongsi and Hikayat — are within five minutes of it. The two furthest apart, Dewan Sri Pinang and Taman Kejiranan Macallum, are roughly 2km, so call it half an hour end to end. Teal pins are the four exhibitions still open.
Two festival venues sit off this map because plotting them would shrink George Town to a dot. GTF x ASAF was at Design Village in Batu Kawan, across the bridge on the mainland, and Art for Peace at the Lin Xiang Xiong Art Gallery south of the city. Both need a car or a Grab, not a walk. Venue positions come from the festival's own map links for each programme.
The festival's venue list doubles as a tour of George Town's heritage core. Almost all of these sit within walking distance of one another — which is the point, and why the closing weekend works as a wander rather than a schedule.
SIX TO ELEVEN opening weekend · Con-Temporary Art stop
Photo: philip.mallis (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
TERANG · CTRL A+C · Steamplant Movement
Photo: philip.mallis (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
When Spirits Meet — 8 & 9 August
Photo: Marufish (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Lament of the Wandering Head — 7 & 8 August
Photo: Andhika Padmawan (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Artist talks for Shifting Whispers, Converge and Con-Temporary Art
Photo: philip.mallis (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Wayang Pacak film screenings
Photo: Azreey (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Con-Temporary Art stop · The Process Room jam
Photo: Cmglee (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Con-Temporary Art stop
Photo: Cmglee (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons
TEWAS at The Courtyard · Con-Temporary Art stop
Photo: Slleong (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
Con-Temporary Art stop in Chinatown
Photo: Wiki Farazi (CC0) via Wikimedia Commons
Landmark on the padang, beside the opening-weekend site
Photo: Paweł 'pbm' Szubert (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons
The festival's most famous output is not a performance — it is the murals. In 2012 George Town Festival funded and commissioned Mirrors George Town, a series of six large-scale wall paintings by the Lithuanian artist Ernest Zacharevic. They are still there, still free, and you can walk the whole set in an afternoon. They are the reason George Town became a street-art destination at all, and they are the one part of the festival you can see on any day of the year.
Ah Quee Street · commissioned by George Town Festival 2012
A painted boy leans out from behind a real parked motorcycle. The interaction between paint and object is the whole idea of the series — the wall is only half the work, the street supplies the rest.
Photo: Azreey (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Armenian Street · commissioned by George Town Festival 2012
The most photographed wall in Penang, and the one that queues. Two painted children ride a real bicycle bolted to the shophouse. It sits on Armenian Street, in the middle of this year’s festival footprint.
Photo: Azreey (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons
Four more murals from the same 2012 commission are still standing, including Little Girl in Blue on Muntri Street and Brother and Sister on a Swing. Our street art guide maps where each one is.
Almost every image on this page is a Creative Commons photograph, credited to the photographer who took it. None of those show a festival performance: no freely-licensed photography of George Town Festival's own productions exists — we searched Wikimedia Commons and Openverse and found none. So the CC images here are the venues, the streets and the murals, the parts of the festival that live in public and can be honestly shown.
The key art is different. Every show and exhibition card on this page carries the festival's own artwork for that programme, which belongs to George Town Festival. Each one is reproduced as editorial illustration of the programme it advertises, credited on the card and linked back to the festival's own listing. Every other image on the page is Creative Commons. For full production photography, go to the official festival site.
Eight visual arts programmes ran across the festival, all free. One is still open, to 4 October. The exhibitions are the part of George Town Festival with the longest tail by a wide margin.
George Town Festival runs every August, and Penang has a festival calendar the rest of the year too. Leave your email and we will send you what is worth planning a trip around — where to eat, what is on, and the parts of the island most visitors walk past.
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Low Chee Peng
Sculptural and interactive work on George Town’s master craftsmen — the trades that filled these shophouses before rents pushed the workshops out.
O Sculpture Art Space
1 August – 30 August · Friday to Sunday only
Key art © George Town Festival
Parallax collective — five artists
A "Core and Canopy" layout of five artistic islands unified by one canopy, with a collaborative centrepiece called The Nexus where all five practices intersect.
George Town
1 August – 9 August · 11am – 4pm
Key art © George Town Festival
Joshua Kon and Arrvinraj
A complete white-cube gallery shrunk to a 1/12-scale diorama and carried around the city. Stops include Padang Kota Lama, Armenian Street, Chulia Street, Pasar Chowrasta, Majestic Theatre, Hin Bus Depot, Beach Street and Cultprint at Armenian Park.
Touring — 8 stops
1 August – 9 August · 2pm – 8pm
Key art © George Town Festival
Yok & Sheryo, curated by Deborah Lim
Artefacts and specimens from the invented island nation of Yeahnahnesia, many shown publicly for the first time.
Cultprint
14 August – 4 October · Friday to Sunday, 12pm – 7pm
Key art © George Town Festival
Steve Tan 陈兴国
Contemporary wet plate photography by the only professional photographer in Malaysia working in collodion — still life on glass, with the depth and strangeness the process gives.
Hikayat
31 July – 30 August
Key art © George Town Festival
Kuei-Chih Lee
Five sculptural forms rising out of the ground, made in response to George Town’s history as a port city shaped by migration.
Taman Kejiranan Macallum
1 August – 31 August
Key art © George Town Festival
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec
Site-specific murals and a triptych built from the accidental ink stains that happen while writing by hand.
Blank Canvas
6 June – 9 August
Key art © George Town Festival
GTF commission
The street once called Brick Kiln Road, after kilns nobody can now locate, read back through the layers it has since acquired.
Hin Bus Depot Gallery and Book Island
1 August – 9 August
Key art © George Town Festival
The projection work runs 8pm to 10.30pm and the opening weekend ran to 11pm. Days are for exhibitions and the food trail; nights are for everything with a crowd. Plan to be out late rather than early.
Nearly every venue is inside the heritage zone and reachable on foot. The free CAT shuttle loops the core; Grab covers the handful of venues outside it, like Gurney Plaza and 1st Avenue. Parking near Armenian Street on a festival night is not worth attempting.
Tickets go on sale in June and the smaller venues — Loft 29, Bangunan U.A.B — sell out first because they hold the fewest seats. Groups of four get 20% off, and the same discount applies to seniors, students and patrons with disabilities on production of ID.
Two of the strongest 2026 productions were wordless by design, and the ticketed theatre carries English surtitles. Street work is built to be understood by whoever happens to walk past it.
A disused colonial bank, a clan house, a converted bus depot. Several of these buildings are otherwise closed to the public, and the festival is the reliable way in. Go early and look at the room before the lights go down.
The festival overlaps with the Hungry Ghost Festival, and Penang Puppet Festival follows on 12–23 August. Hotel rates in George Town reflect all of it, so book accommodation well ahead of the dates.
Street opera in George Town, outside the festival. Penang's performance traditions run all year — the festival concentrates them and adds the international programme on top.
Photo: HundenvonPenang via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Not a George Town Festival production.
Programme titles, dates, times and venues on this page were taken from the festival's own listings at georgetownfestival.com and its box office, with ticket prices, runtimes and age guidance from the linked CloudJoi booking pages. Checked 6 August 2026. Times and availability can change during the festival — confirm against the official listing before you travel to a venue.
Exhibition run dates and opening days were read from each exhibition's own page on the festival site on 15 August 2026, and each title above links back to the page it came from.
One figure comes from elsewhere: the “over 40 programmes” count was announced by the Penang state government at the festival launch on 4 June 2026, not published on the festival's own site. The festival's programme listing carries about 30 entries, several of which are containers holding many separate works.
The festival puts you in the heritage zone at its best. These will tell you where to eat, sleep and walk while you are there.
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