A Solo Exhibition by Suzann Victor

In conjunction with SG60 | Supported by the National Arts Council

Curated by Anca Rujoiu, this timely exhibition pays tribute to Victor’s remarkable four-decade career and marks a reflective moment in Singapore’s cultural discourse, examining how colonial histories are remembered and represented. Through layered imagery and shifting narratives, it invites viewers to reconsider the past not as a fixed story, but an evolving presence that continues to shape perspectives today.

The exhibition will feature an optically restless suite of works that rematerialises the ethnographic postcards of Southeast Asia from moments of early colonial encounter into a complex hand-painted tableaux that generate spaces of pictorial privacy and self-mapping for the colonised subject.

Ensconced behind a screen of lenses, never at once can the entirety of the image be seen clearly.  Lenses dilate vision. As the spectator peers through this field of “compound eyes” into the picture, random details are magnified, dissected and dislodged, coalescing as an atlas of ever-shifting boundaries that morph, blend and clash as the viewer adjusts vantage point. Such

discontinuous ways of seeing, at the cost and in isolation from the whole, produces an optical decomposition; the pictorial narrative is kaleidoscopically cut up by the lenses – turning order into disjuncture, flatness into depth, the singular into the multiple, and the static into the kinetic (image and viewer). Illuminating the human sensorial experience, perception and phenomena, this exhibition will invite the audience to deepen their awareness, become cognizant of their immediate responses to stimuli, and contemplate on how such encounters shape their understanding of the world around them.