A Thousand Histories – A Solo Show by Suzann Victor

What does a lens do? Since 1997, artist Suzann Victor has imaginatively expanded the function of lens from a purely optical device to a sculptural medium. Lens has become one of Victor’s key artistic materials in her ongoing probing of the physical, sensorial and political properties of space to perform narratives of gendered and colonised bodies. In her iconic work Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997), which marked her participation in the 6th Havana Biennale, Victor stitched over three thousand lenses with glass into a quilt trailing from a metal bed suspended above the floor. This optical and bodily fabric—infused with mixed blood from the artist and her Havana’s hosts—became a repository of memory, speaking to the complex dynamics of hospitality, intimacy, and cultural exchange.

Her solo exhibition at Gajah Gallery, A Thousand Histories, marks the culmination of nearly three decades of experimentation with lenses. Four monumental sculptures constructed from thousands of Fresnel lenses transform the exhibition space into an expanded cinema that thematically and formally destabilises the politics of representation and norms of visibility. Victor’s immersive installations harness the Fresnel lens’s distinct ability to focus powerful beams of light, a property that originally defined their use for lighthouses to guide ships safely to shore. Here, however, the lens becomes a medium not of prescribed navigation in space, but of purposeful disorientation. Found photographs and colonial-era postcards from Southeast Asia that expose histories of domination and production of otherness are refracted through the lenses, forming large-scale, fractured compositions or in the artist’s words ,“lens-scapes”.

Venue: Gajah Gallery Singapore, 39 Keppel Road, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, #03-04, Singapore 089065