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”.
In this latest iteration of her lens series, the artist juxtaposes three large-scale kinetic lanterns with a six-metre-long gridded wall. While the lanterns evoke the spatial and surveillance technology of the panopticon—historically designed to render bodies legible, knowable and controllable in the production of colonial and gendered subjects—Victor’s kinetic sculptures radically subvert this logic. The lens, once an instrument of the dominant gaze, now drifts from possession toward the elusive — in pursuit of the fugitive image.
Behind the lenses, a single backlit image rotates in a gentle clockwise motion like the slow current of a river. Yet what unfolds in front of the viewer is a choreography of contradiction: larger lenses reveal the clockwise path, while smaller ones, through intensified magnification and spatial offset, conjure a counterclockwise illusion. This simultaneous divergence—where the same image appears to move in two opposing directions at once—fractures the field of vision into a constellation of image fragments. As in Victor’s other kinetic sculptures, the unmooring perception stems not from engineering complexity but from the quiet force of fundamental optical physics.
No single image can be fully seen, consumed, or possessed. There is no fixed vantage point. There is no totalising gaze. The image remains in perpetual motion, it refuses to yield clarity or closure. What does a lens do? It unfolds a thousand histories. (Anca Rujoiu, writer and curator)
