SINGAPORE.- As Singapore marks its 60th year of independence, Gajah Gallery presents A Thousand Histories, a landmark solo exhibition by Sydney-based Singaporean artist Suzann Victor. A figure of critical importance in Southeast Asian contemporary art, Victor is known for her kinetic sculptures, architecturally responsive installations, and politically charged performances. This exhibition marks the culmination of nearly three decades of her artistic experimentation with optics, memory, and power. This timely exhibition — accompanied by an insightful essay from curator Anca Rujoiu — unfolds as a profound act of remembrance and resistance in an era marked by efforts to challenge colonial legacies.

Victor’s work has long defied disciplinary and gender boundaries. From her historic participation at the 6th Havana Biennale, the first time the biennale included an Asian section, to being the first woman artist to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001, Victor has consistently probed the poetics and politics of visibility. Through collaborations with Yogya Art Lab (YAL), Gajah Gallery’s production arm in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, she has expanded her lens sculptures to an architectural scale.

A Thousand Histories features three large-scale kinetic lanterns with a six-metre-long gridded wall constructed from thousands of Fresnel lenses, building on nearly three decades of Victor’s experimentation with the medium. This latest iteration of her acclaimed lens series transforms the gallery into an immersive cinematic environment. The lens— originally an instrument of control and clarity — becomes a tool of disruption. Found colonial photographs are refracted through kinetic lanterns and sculptural grids, forming fractured compositions that unmoor perception.

As described by Rujoiu, Victor’s installations evoke the surveillance logic of the panopticon while simultaneously undermining it. Behind the optics, a quiet choreography of contradiction unfolds: single images appear to rotate both clockwise and counterclockwise, a visual paradox grounded in the basic physics of the Fresnel lens. Here, no single narrative can dominate — no perspective can claim wholeness.

Complementing this body of work is the concurrent re-staging of Victor’s groundbreaking early work Still Life (1992/93) at the National Gallery Singapore. Together, these presentations affirm her indelible place in Southeast Asia’s contemporary art history and trace a lineage of artistic inquiry spanning from feminist activism to optical physics.

In a global climate marked by visual oversaturation and historical flattening, A Thousand Histories resists reduction. It offers not a singular reading of the past, but a field of shimmering, elusive truths. It is a radical act of remembrance. An aesthetic of refusal. A luminous reflection on perception and power.

Suzann Victor is a Singapore-born, Sydney-based contemporary artist known for prospecting the contours of human sensorial experience, perception and phenomena. Her works activate materials derived from the body, the physics of light, water, sound and lenses, in conjunction with engineered components and the readymade. Through intimate performances, large-scale installations, public artworks and collective labour, Victor creates 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 at its inaugural showing in the 49th Venice Biennale (2001), she is the concept-developer of 5th Passage, Singapore’s first corporate-sponsored female-artist-run space that set the precedent of reaching out to the public long before “outreach” became a mainstay of local art institutions to come. A leading figure in Singapore’s contemporary art ecology, Victor’s socio-political works are recognised for their critical engagement with the colonial aftermath in Southeast Asia, the politics of female disembodiment and the inversion of the abject.

On environmental concerns, her meteorological installation at the 4th Singapore Biennale employed green technology to produce objectless art - optically conjured with the eye - by inducing natural rainbow arcs to appear within the museum’s rotunda. Its methodological precursor, the Rich Manoeuvre iterations, presented a mid-air calligraphy of twelve live ephemeral drawings rendered by moving lights from swaying chandelier-pendulums – a signature kinetic series whose ocular nature captivated audiences physiologically and psychologically at multiple international venues. This conflation of dynamic image, sumptuous materiality, movement, and multi-tiered concepts epitomises Victor’s oeuvre.

Victor’s works have been commissioned for presentation beyond Venice in notable exhibitions including the 6th Havana Biennale, 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the 6th Gwangju Biennale, and the 4th Singapore Biennale. As part of the Sunshower Exhibition (Tokyo, 2017), she was invited by the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum for a special artist residency to create a cultural response to the city. Her iconic performance, Still Waters 1998, was honoured 21 years later as the theme of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in 2019.

She received her MA and BA (First Class Honours) and completed her doctorate in 2009 at the University of Western Sydney, supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award and the UWS Top Up Award. Victor’s works reside in public and private collections worldwide.