Since its initial utilisation in Third World Extra Virgin Dreams (1997) presented at the 6th Havana Biennale, Fresnel lenses have been a feature in Suzann Victor’s practice. The optical qualities of magnification, inversion and refraction of these transparent prismatic objects have since been deployed by the artist to negotiate and interrogate both visual and cerebral aspects of perception.

In her signature Lens Paintings series, a screen of circular lenses creates a restless image. Fractured and obscuring, yet bringing into focus the pictorial narrative one micro-view at a time, it induces the shifting and angling moves of the “kinetic” viewer upon whom any observation of the artwork is contingent. Never at once, can the entirety of the rendered subjects beneath the lenses be seen clearly.

Fissures, laser-burned into some lenses provide direct glimpses into slivers of minutiae below. Drawn from images of veins and riverine systems, they confront viewers as if wounds have been cauterised so as to be kept open to offer unadulterated insight. In She’s Closer Than You Think (2019), the painting’s source material was derived from the personal archives of a woman who was coerced into sexual slavery during the Second World War, and revealed as the grandmother of Victor’s friend. For Unequal Innocence (2020), Victor drew from ethnographic images of women across Asia found in postcards of the 1900s, replete with their sombre, defiant gazes whilst hand-written othering descriptions found on the back served to form and inform the knowledge economies circulating back in Europe where they were destined.

River of Returning Gazes (2022) is similarly invested in rematerialising these colonial encounters by liberating (retrospectively) the humanity of the photographed subjects that have been reduced and captured in these dehumanising ethnographic portrayals such that the artwork becomes a site to speak from rather than to speak about and around those depicted. At such a location, a reworked Singapore River also offers a panoramic humanscape proliferating with the complex and rich but obscured migrant histories that founded the postcolonial city-state.