Suzann Victor

Born 1959, Singapore
Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts (Hons), Doctor of Philosophy
Graduation show: 2008
Graduation ceremony: 1997, 2000 (Hons), 2009 (Doctorate)

Artwork in Space YZ

Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan – Womb (Prototype), 1996
Crushed glass, glass, adhesive
Dimensions variable
28 x 15 x 18 cm

Encrusted with layers of red crushed glass that have been invisibly bound together, each hand-sculpted human organ in this work wears the idea of brokenness as a precious form of the female corporeal, a shroud of imperfection that does not attempt to hide but rather, displays the wounds that break yet make us, where faults and flaws are not obscured from view but shown as essential markers of an unfolding journey to shine forth.

Created for the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Tintoretto’s Risen Christ Arresting Lazy Susan responded directly to Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting, Cristo Risorgente (The Risen Christ) in the Queensland Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Lit cavities were carved out of the three curved walls originally fabricated for the painting’s display but now loaned to exhibit the installation’s broken glass renditions of a heart, tongue, clitoris, womb, a pair of ovaries and nipples. Together with the painting’s back to back location, these two linkages (walls and site) provided a conceptual premise that examined societal taboos pertaining to the menstruating female body in contrast to the privileging of blood shed from male bodies, in this case, the painting’s heroic, redemptive and sacrificial bleeding orifices depicted in the open palms of Christ.

The space parenthesised by the curved wall themselves encircled a bodiless garment, in turn surrounded by the flame-red calligraphic texts groomed from human hair that spelt out various seepages from the female body. In such a manner, the body of the disembodied woman emerges as a phantom upon a rotating turntable – with every angle subject to scrutiny. This conceptualisation of the gossamer figure as a phantom – present, yet non-present – appears fitting within the trajectories of institutional collections of art. Recalling the accompanying caption to the infamous 1989 poster Do Women Have To Be Naked To Get Into the Met. Museum? from the anonymous feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls, “less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female,” the representation of women within the larger arc of art history is ghostly indeed. Such a revelation pulls into focus the underlying, systemic, causative factors for the apparent juxtaposition of the bleeding male saviour against the impure menstruating woman – the persistent societal trope spanning the length of history and breadth of cultures, from Hypatia of Alexandria to present day women banned from entry into Hindu temples.

This work was also a continuation of His Mother is a Theatre, 1994, a performative-installation created as a response to the media-incited controversy that triggered the Singapore state’s swift de facto ban on performance art in 1994, an important art historical moment that I was involved in prior to arriving as an international student in Australia to begin my Honours year at UWS in 1996.

These sculptures were one of my first hand-made pieces produced in the backyard of my off-campus student accommodation in Kingswood. While this involved some violence and destruction, it presented a generative process to create a new material out of the deliberate destruction of another - the hammering and smashing of red glass into particles and organising them into a range of granular sizes and palette of hues (that could surprisingly be achieved from a single tone of red), for reconstituting into the aforementioned sculptures.

This memory of a potentially injurious way of artmaking jolts me back to the first few nights I spent in the suburbia of Kingswood, alone and alarmed, one of which I walked the Great Western Highway looking desperately for a public phone to call my close friend who had arrived in Sydney on the same flight but who, like me, was also whizzed off to our respective universities at the airport. I recall the desolation of the landscape permeating my psyche, only to be snapped back into survival mode when men in passing cars threw beer bottles at me as I approached the petrol station. For the first time in my life, I understood in a cellular way what it was and is like to have racial and prejudicial abuse literally hurled at me in the open. This was 1996, and after further similar incidents, I also learned first-hand how society’s unconscious was unleashed by Hanson’s dangerous racial slurs and rhetoric, floodgates that we are still trying to close today.

I am very grateful to UWS, David Hull and Anne Graham, the arts faculty and the crown jewels - Z block’s incredible technical team especially Jules Gull and Nick Dorrer for the tremendous support I received along with the faculty scholarships, the Australian Postgraduate Award and the UWS Top-Up Award for my doctoral studies.

Learn more about Suzann Victor by visiting her website.