For over three decades, artist Suzann Victor has probed the physical, sensorial, and political properties of space. Employing a diversity of materials, from the bodily and organic to metal and glass, Victor’s artistic practice is defined by an ability to validate the fragility of being and reinforce the power of creativity. Trained at LASALLE College of the Arts in the late 1980s, Victor was the initiator of 5th Passage, an independent art space established in 1991 that played an integral role in artistic experimentation in Singapore in the 1990s, preceding major state-funded institutional developments. Victor received her PhD at the University of Western Sydney in 2009. She was the first woman to represent Singapore at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001).

Strike (2021) is an interactive installation that stages a performance of sound and drawing in space through simple means. As with other kinetic installations by Victor inspired by physics, Strike operates as a lever device, trading force against movement. The work turns water-filled glass objects into musical instruments inviting the audience to participate in an ephemeral act of creation. With a simple tug, visitors can activate the sets of strikers—acrylic spheres situated at the end of long cables with counterweights. Swinging back and forth, the strikers hit against the glass releasing a sequence of sounds into the space, which have different tonalities and pitches conditioned by the water level in each vessel. 

Throughout her artistic practice, Victor has stressed the potential of liminal spaces—a passageway, a drain, gaps between tiles—to accommodate the things for which society often leaves little space: creativity and difference. In Strike, the artist thoughtfully choreographs the gaps between each glass vessel so that the negative space carries sonic potential. Every activation creates a unique performance of sound that situates the act of creation at the intersection of many constraints and factors, including chance. In the 1990s, Victor advanced the notion of disembodied art in her installations that made use of kinetic elements to bypass what the state perceived as the “subversive” agency of the body and acts of performance art. For an artist who has persistently affirmed the virtues of creative expression, Strike not only reinstates agency but overtly transfers it to the audience.