Iiu Susiraja

The Finnish photographer and video artist Iiu Susiraja’s first US solo museum exhibition, Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish, is up at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York. When you enter, you’re both greeted by and confronted with a single work, facing you on the wall, entitled Woman(2010). An early, iconic work by the artist, it seems at first a straightforward photo of a fat woman dressed in a black dress with a wool cap on her head and big blue work gloves. There is almost no dead space outside of her body, which fills the width of the frame. Her eyes are looking off, perhaps dolefully, perhaps in boredom. Tucked into her cap, perfectly covering each ear like a warming flap, is a fish. Tucked into each glove is also a fish. The woman in the photo is Iiu Susiraja.

Iiu Susiraja comes from a long tradition of photographers who stay at home, dress up, and take pictures of themselves. Claude Cahun, Catherine Opie, Patty Chang, Cindy Sherman — they are there and not there in their images, playing cat and mouse with that elusive animal called identity, enacting dreams and surfacing subconscious anxieties. Susiraja is different: nearly six feet tall, heavy, inescapable.

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Whoever said summer is an art world deadzone needs to see what’s on view in New York right now. Maybe we’re still striding through springtime in this hemisphere, but after weeks away from the gallery circuit, Brooklyn-based art writer Vittoria Benzine was gleefully surprised by lineups on view across the city. Some standouts just closed, like Fred Eversely’s Jolly Rancher monoliths at David Kordansky and Liu Xiaodong’s debut at Lisson, but even more remain on view. Read on to catch the season in full swing — each comes with a review to tell if it’s for you.

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The strange, discomfiting photographs and videos of the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja push so many buttons that her provocative exhibition at MoMA PS1 should have been staged in an elevator — to paraphrase the theater critic Peter Marks. These powerful works take aim at a dizzying array of contemporary body image issues, obsessions and taboos, and from different angles, including fat shaming, fitness, obesity, standards of beauty, dysmorphia, self-loathing, self-love and of course sex.

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When an artist uses his or her own face and body as the subject for single photographs or larger bodies of work, we inevitably get caught up in the definitional (and linguistic) question of whether such pictures are actually “self-portraits”. In many cases, these photographs are indeed knowing studies of the self, or the roles, stereotypes, and permutations of identity that surround the personas that we actively construct for ourselves.

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Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja has always sought out the extraordinary, whether photographing nature as part of her curriculum at school or later in her career – which has recently led to her first solo museum exhibition in the US, at MoMA PS1. In this show, which is titled A style called a dead fish, over 50 trace the artist’s self-portraits in which she poses alone at her apartment in Turku, surrounded or covered by mundane objects in different rooms.

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MoMA PS1 presents the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of photographer Iiu Susiraja (b. 1975, Turku, Finland). The presentation will bring together over fifty photographs and videos that highlight the trajectory of Susiraja’s practice since 2008, when she was beginning to photograph and film herself in interior spaces. Most often, her images are shot in her apartment in Turku, Finland—the city where she has lived nearly her entire life. 

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As the Finnish artist’s show opens at New York's MoMA PS1, we sit down with her to talk inclusion, using her body as a prop, and heading stateside. Finnish contemporary artist Iiu Susiraja is a master of balancing hyperrealism with absurdity, and melancholy with humor. As her art stardom has skyrocketed, so has the array of adjectives used to describe her work. Mesmerizing. Confounding. Brave. Vulnerable. 

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The Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja makes photographs using herself as a model, but her images are less self-portraits than still-lifes. A deadpan protagonist—or a jarring centerpiece—she appears amid carefully staged arrangements of household objects, gazing into the camera with rich dispassion. Take the image “Fountain,” from 2021. The shot’s vantage foreshortens Susiraja’s reclining figure, exaggerating its proportions, rendering her bare legs and midsection mountainous while shrinking her head, which almost aligns with the composition’s vanishing point. 

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Nino Mier Gallery presents Women’s Work, an exhibition of photographs and videos by Finnish artist IIU SUSIRAJA.  Susiraja is known for her still and moving image portraits, which capture the artist in her own home or her parents’ home, interacting with items such as  housekeeping tools and pantry staples with prurient, deadpan humor.  In Women’s Work, which will be on view from February 18 – March 19, 2022 in Los Angeles, Susiraja brings a sense of irreverent, macabre irony to the type of labor which extracts value from the display of women’s bodies.

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Since 2007, the Finnish photographer and video artist Iiu Susiraja has made her own massive physique the centerpiece of her work. I vividly remember the first time I saw one of her early self-portraits, Broom, 2010, from her series “Good Behavior,” 2008–10. In this picture, the artist stands in the middle of what might be a kitchen or dining room, wearing a plain navy skirt and a drab, peasant-style blouse. Wedged beneath her breasts, unencumbered by a brassiere, is the long wooden handle of the namesake object. Her short, choppy haircut—“soft prison butch” seems an appropriate way of characterizing it—exacerbates an unsettling gaze, which is equal parts bemusement, frustration, and quiet fury. It is Susiraja’s trademark expression.

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The Finnish Art Society has selected the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja as the recipient of its $15,500 William Thuring Foundation Prize, which was established as an award for midcareer artists between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Susiraja, who was born in 1975 and lives in Turku, Finland, works primarily in photographic and video-based self-portraiture to make art that relates to feminine performance, psychoanalysis, and body humor.

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The Finnish Art Society has selected the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja as the recipient of its $15,500 William Thuring Foundation Prize, which was established as an award for midcareer artists between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five. Susiraja, who was born in 1975 and lives in Turku, Finland, works primarily in photographic and video-based self-portraiture to make art that relates to feminine performance, psychoanalysis, and body humor.

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The exhibition Dry Joy by Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja presents a selection of her works from a period of more than ten years. Susiraja creates candid and honest photographs and videos with a sense of warmth and humour. Although she appears in the works herself, they are not simply self-portraits but rather performances for the camera. Susiraja’s photographs and videos will be on display in at Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki from March 15 onwards. The show includes both early works and more recent oeuvre.

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Finnish photographer Iiu Susiraja uses herself and her home to speak to larger dynamics at play between domesticity and women. In her series of self-portraits, Good Behavior, Susiraja poses with household tools like brooms, oven mitts, and rolling pins — getting about as intimate as possible with such items. In an interview with Dazed Magazine, Susiraja cites a few messages she hopes her art sends: It says that "the abnormal may be normal" and that "at home, you can be yourself, wild and free."

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