About the Artist

Suzann Victor (b. 1959, Singapore) is a Singapore-born, Sydney-based contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans performance, installation, and public art. Working across light, water, sound, and lens-based technologies, Victor probes the limits of perception and the politics of visibility, creating immersive environments that position the viewer’s body as an active site of encounter. Her works frequently draw on sensorial phenomena and optical physics, merging engineered systems with the readymade to destabilise fixed ways of seeing and knowing.

A pioneering figure in Southeast Asian contemporary art, Victor was the first woman to represent Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2001. She is also the co-founder of 5th Passage (1991–1996), one of the region’s earliest feminist artist-run initiatives, which played a critical role in shaping Singapore’s early contemporary art ecology and public engagement with experimental practices. Her work has consistently addressed questions of marginality, disembodiment, and institutional critique, often foregrounding the unseen and the unheard—particularly the histories and experiences of women.

Victor’s practice is deeply informed by her diasporic experience between Singapore and Australia, where shifting contexts of belonging and otherness have sharpened her engagement with power, identity, and the legacies of colonialism. Across decades, she has developed a distinctive visual and conceptual language that resists singular perspectives, instead offering fractured, kinetic, and often ephemeral forms that unfold through movement and time.

Her works have been presented internationally, including at the Havana Biennale, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Singapore Biennale, among others, and are held in major public and private collections worldwide. From early performance works such as Still Waters (1998) to her ongoing lens-based installations, Victor’s oeuvre is marked by a sustained inquiry into how bodies, images, and histories are mediated, controlled, and reimagined. Her Still Life Series, held in the collection of the National Gallery Singapore, further reflects this investigation—foregrounding the tension between material presence and perceptual instability.

Recent projects, including her 2025 solo exhibition A Thousand Histories and the monumental kinetic installation City Lantern—presented in the Encounters sector at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026—extend her longstanding investigation into colonial image-making and its afterlives. Through fields of refracted imagery and shifting visual planes, these works challenge the authority of the singular gaze, proposing instead a fluid, contested, and embodied mode of seeing.

Victor’s practice ultimately centres on the transformative potential of perception: how we see, how we remember, and how meaning is continuously constructed through lived, bodily experience.

On view at Art Basel Hong Kong until 29 March 2026.

With thanks to Aisha Amrin, Hannah Jaugan, and Gajah Gallery.