Suzann Victor

Suzann Victor (born 1959) is a Singaporean contemporary artist based in Australia whose practice spans installation, painting, and performance art.

[1][2][3] Victor is most known for her public artworks and installations that examine ideas of disembodiment, the postcolonial, and the environmental in response to space, context and architecture.

She was one of four artists selected to exhibit at Singapore's first national pavilion at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, alongside Henri Chen KeZhan, Salleh Japar, and Matthew Ngui.

[1] In the 1970s, after completing her GCE 'O' Levels at Fairfield Methodist Girls' School, Victor searched for a job and enrolled in a secretarial course, though she did not get the opportunity to apply her skills.

[3] In 1988, Victor and her LASALLE College of the Arts classmates took over a stretch of Orchard Road with their abstract prints and paintings, holding a small exhibition by displaying their work on the ground.

[9][10][1] From 1991 to 1994, 5th Passage would support performance art, installation, music, photography, and design,[11] also organising public readings and forums.

[1][15] Around a year after 5th Passage's programmes at Pacific Plaza, the founder-directors of the initiative left for further studies and the group disbanded, with Victor leaving for Australia.

As metaphorical repositories for society’s overflowing 'unconscious', these longkangs (Malay for drains) collect, siphon and direct the abject, the polluting, expired, decaying or the 'useless', into watery depths—the sea around the island.

[16]Such drains were a relic of the building's colonial architecture, made purposeless by retrofitted glass walls that turned a once-exposed balcony on the second-floor into a sealed, controlled air-conditioned space for artworks.