Suzann Victor

About the work

In this optically restless work, Sun-Moon confronts the audience with a 4m diameter screen of lenses as the site through which encounters with the open landscape are to be conducted.
Behaving like an ocular environment amplifier, 600+ lenses simultaneously obscure and bring into focus details of the surroundings as a means to renew, and at times, to confound the acts of looking and beholding the familiar – contingent always upon the viewer’s position and angle of observation.
As the spectator peers through this field of “compound eyes” whose focal length dilates vision, the surrounding landscape is repeatedly magnified, fractured, inverted and displaced all at once.
Such discontinuous ways of seeing produces an optical decomposition where the landscape is kaleidoscopically cut up by as many lenses into a proliferating faceted surface – turning the singular into the multiple, see-throughness to density and the upright into the inverted – all while activating the kinetically-engaged viewer.

Photos by Heeseon Jung

About the artist

The works of Suzann Victor prospect the contours of human sensorial experience, perception and phenomena by mining materials from the body, the elements of light and water to the science of physics, alongside engineered components and the readymade. Through performances of vulnerability, acts of collective labour, installations or public artworks, Victor emboldens the significance of sites, spaces and architecture by transforming them into immersive environments that draw awareness to the viewer’s own body as an investigative tool for apprehending the world at large.
The first female artist to represent Singapore in its inaugural showing at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), Victor was also the concept-developer of 5th Passage, one of Southeast Asia’s earliest feminist artists-initiative (1991-1994). Her works have been curated into notable platforms such as 6th Havana Biennale, 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial, 6th Gwangju Biennale, 4th Singapore Biennale, Australian! (2008, Casula Powerhouse), 2008 Adelaide Biennale, Shaping Geographies (Gajah Gallery), Sunshower Exhibition (2018, NAC Tokyo & Mori Art Museum) and Thermocline of Art (ZKM, Karlsruhe). Her public artworks are sited at high-profile locations such as World Square, Sydney and the National Museum of Singapore. She was awarded the New York-based Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship (2009) and two special residencies from the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2017 & 2018). Victor received her doctorate in 2009 supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award & the UWS Top Up Award. Her works reside in private and corporate collections worldwide.