Third World Extra Virgin Dreams is one of Suzann Victor’s most important and iconic early installations that was first conceptualised as a response to the unique historic architecture of the Cabania Fortress at the 6th Havana Biennale in Cuba. The work features motifs that recur in Victor’s later work, signalling her interest in themes such as the place of the (woman’s) body in patriarchal society and the post-colonial condition.

At the centre of the installation is a used single bed. The bed is the site of beginnings and endings, where human conception, birth and death take place. It performs as host and witness to one’s most private moments: sleep, sexual fantasies/fulfilment, dreams and nightmares. Evoking rest and restlessness, the bed is, in the artist’s words, “imprinted with not only the human form but its corporeality.”

A monumental ten-metre patchwork quilt, comprising thousands of Fresnel lenses, drapes over the suspended bed. The lenses’ transparent, light refractive quality create a dreamlike state that hovers between “fragility and strength, appearance and disappearance, visibility and invisibility, intrusion and expulsion.” On each lens is a brush of wine and blood. The latter was taken from the artist and the father of the family which hosted Victor in Cuba. The act of drawing/giving blood, almost ritual-like, becomes symbolic of the intermingling of memory and life between both individuals. The glass quilt may also recall hymenal material, where each drop of “virgin” blood presents the essence of an anonymous subjectivity (a child, a woman), reduced to their most vulnerable manifestation and trapped between glass and lens.

A dramatic transfiguration of the mundane occurs in Third World Extra Virgin Dreams. The installation assumes a certain power to seduce and compel the viewer to be drawn in through the sheer potency of the visual image.