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.
Ambiguously titled “Iiu Susiraja: A Style Called a Dead Fish,” the show features 49 photographs and 13 short videos dating from 2008 to 2022. Most are self-portraits that show her wryly using as props a variety of domestic items — stuffed animals, kitchen utensils and especially food. But the main character is Susiraja, a blond woman nearly six feet tall, who is extremely large, if not morbidly obese, and usually stares out at us with lofty indifference. Like most artists whose work matters, Susiraja has no shame. She also presents something of an emotional blank, knowing that her viewers will fill it in.
Born in 1975 in Turku, Finland, where she still lives, Susiraja (pronounced ee-you susi-rah-yah) started out as a textile designer. In 2007, she took up photography and, turning the camera on herself, began to make starkly direct, somewhat humorous, painfully vulnerable self-portraits. They are complex yet widely appealing, even magnetic. Easy resolution of their meanings is impossible, which creates a rich internal narrative in the viewer, often starting with one’s feelings about one’s own body.
This richness may account for the extensive writing on Susiraja’s art, both inside and outside the art world, despite her relatively brief career. Her first solo gallery shows occurred in 2016 in Finland and the United States — the latter at Ramiken Crucible on the Lower East Side. (A show of new work and small sculptural objects is at Nino Mier Gallery in TriBeCa, through June 17.)
Susiraja’s pictures and videos riff on pornography, fashion photography and art history, while bringing a new emotional rawness to postmodern photography. The precedents for her D.I.Y setups include the French modernist Claude Cahun, and Americans like Hannah Wilke, Cindy Sherman, Jimmy DeSana, Laurie Simmons and James Casebere. In Susiraja’s performative use of her own body she seems most closely related to Wilke, whose final works fearlessly chronicled her unsuccessful fight with cancer, and to DeSana, whose visualization of gay beauty and fantasy, delineate, like hers, a region of otherness.
The show opens with several photographs from 2010, when Susiraja seems to have found her footing. Opposite the entrance, the declarative “Woman” confronts us directly. Seated, wearing all black, she is a monumental, forceful presence.
Crucial to this power is the helmet-like headgear she devised from a white knit cap with herrings stuck in the band, which resemble ear flaps. More herrings peek out of the purple knit gloves she wears, further enhancing the ritualistic stillness of the image. Nothing settles down here: man, woman, athlete, warrior, monarch, deity — all fomented by the artist’s size and her ingenious use of negligible materials.
A Valkyrie awaits in “Training” (also 2021), this time as a headdress embellished with braids (of bread) that turn Susiraja into a Wagnerian heroine. This is not to ignore the treadmill or the work’s title, but to suggest that the cudgel of exercise will be met with resistance.
It may be that Susiraja’s art divides into two halves: proud and heroic, and abject and heroic. As “Training” demonstrates, parts of both can often be found in the same artwork.
Nearby “Bad Legs,” also from 2010, goes mostly abject, although with undeniable belligerence. Evoking an early 1970s William Wegman video, it takes aim at the widespread obsession with legs as a measure of attractiveness and value. Here only the artist’s thick feet and calves are shown. Duct-taped to each leg is a clear plastic bag containing a dainty, slim-heeled pump, which doesn’t seem likely to fit the artist — a painful recognition that is stated with brutal honesty.
In “Gloves” (2019), Susiraja exaggerates the already extreme female ideal endemic to old masters painting. She appears in form-fitting underwear and strikes a Three Graces pose, touching a wood coat tree — like Eve proposing some apple tasting. A pair of yellow rubber gloves tucked into the bottom edge of her bra, and startling bruises that the artist has declined to explain, complete her outfit.
Susiraja displays a marked indifference to aesthetics, which may explain the “dead fish style” of the show’s title. Most of her photographs have an ersatz blandness; they are often inspired by whatever she finds around her apartment or her parents’ home where most of them are also taken. Their life stems from her mountainous body, and what she does to it.
But she juices up several images here by using brightly patterned fabrics as backdrops. For example, the expanses of exuberant plaid in “Sausage Cupid” (2019) are so overwhelming that you almost lose sight of the artist. She rises to the occasion, in a dark blue bathing suit, holding a blue umbrella festooned with strings of sausages, perhaps for Cupid to bestow on deserving couples.
Susiraja’s videos extend her images into short resonant actions, usually around a minute in length, and provide a kind of comic relief. In “Cow” she evokes an udder with a yellow rubber glove, a quart of milk and a shiny milk bucket. In “Stand,” possibly the most humiliating piece in the show, Susiraja fits a wire hanger around her head and hangs it on a coat tree, which requires her to stoop awkwardly. And in “Mirror,” she stands in the kitchen, laying curled pieces of bacon on the glass of a small hand mirror. Fastening the pieces together with some dozen yellow-headed hat pins, she creates a charming little thing: a temporary, miniature Post-Minimal sculpture that was probably soon eaten.
In her essay for the show’s catalog, Jody Graf, assistant curator and organizer of the show, writes of Susiraja, “Her photographs may be funny, but they are never a joke.” It’s slightly gnomic, this distinction, but it suggests that while Susiraja’s works can be amusing, unexpected and shocking, they are never at anyone’s expense. Funny in Susiraja’s case pulls us in, makes us sympathetic and possesses a depth whose bottom we may never reach.
Iiu Susiraja: A Style Called a Dead Fish
Through Sept. 4 at MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens, (718) 784-2084); momaps1.org.
