Iiu Susiraja Embraces the Torpor of the Exhausted Body

Reviews of Iiu Susiraja’s 2023 survey exhibition at MoMA PS1, ‘A style called a dead fish’, fixated on the fact of the Finnish artist’s fatness in her self-portraits. In photographs that play on the history of painting – particularly male painters’ fascination with the abstraction of folds of white extra-abundant flesh (Lucian Freud’s depictions of ‘Fat Sue’ come to mind) – the now 50-year-old artist is naked or else wearing a colourful dress or bathing suit, on display with various props, posing within domestic settings. The other element repeated in reviews is Susiraja’s deadpan expression, which the press materials for ‘Touchdown by Venus’, her show of 14 large-scale photographs and five videos at Gratin Gallery in New York, attribute to a Finnish mien of expressionlessness and connect to the usual canon of women self-portraitists (who – with the exception of Catherine Opie and Laura Aguilar, who have also photographed their ordinary, excessive bodies – are not relevant here).

Susiraja’s inexpressiveness, rather than engaging with melodrama, is purposefully inscrutable, subverting the tired trope of the animated and grotesque fat comic. Her documented performances break down actions serially, playing on the torpor of an exhausted body while still rendering what Tina Post, in her study on deadpan and Black representation (Deadpan, 2023), in a chapter on Buster Keaton, refers to as ‘lively thingness’. The props at play make light (in many ways!) of both the tropes of fatness and the handwringing messaging of the obesity ‘epidemic’, and also the expectations of portraiture, pushing against sublimity. The photographic works in the Gratin show, which overwhelm (in a good way) the white, clinical room in which they’re staged, date from 2025. They evince a prodigious output that is also ambivalently about slowness, about the house of the body within a claustrophobic room.

In the photographic series ‘Lift Up’ (2025), red balloons duct taped to the artist’s nude form hold up various body parts (one gets a sense of being inside a tiny, horrible clinic, with a doctor-viewer scrutinizing every flaw). In the peekaboo ‘Marilyn Garden’ (2025) series, Susiraja, standing in front of a seemingly cheap wooden entertainment centre, wears a red dress with nothing underneath, a silk flower at the crotch; in ‘Flesh Painting’ (2025), she holds kitschy paintings cut with holes that her bulk pushes through. What Susiraja stages with class and the petit bourgeois European home is interesting, calling to mind Lauren Berlant writing in Cruel Optimism (2011) on impassivity in the context of political depression. The artist poses with the same spare wooden furniture in ‘Collection’ and ‘Dream Team’ (both 2025); she presses Lladro-like ceramic figurines between her breasts or pairs the flatness of her image on a television screen with her flat demeanour.

In the photographs, Susiraja becomes an object amidst other objects. But the Buster Keaton quality is at its height with Susiraja’s videos, displayed on iPad pedestals in the gallery (and posted on her Instagram). There is play with mechanized objects such as hot dogs on power drills in the hilariously named John Wayne (2020). Similarly mechanized are the photocopiers at the centre of the room that print out keepsake serial images of the artist in various stages of putting on pantyhose, One size fits all (2010), riffing on Hito Steyerl’s ‘poor image’.  These skits, if you can call them that, are silent and still. They reference the expressionlessness of the TikTok tradwife, such as Nara Smith’s ASMR drone, especially when foodplay is involved: in Make Jam (2018), Susiraja smushes strawberries in a plastic bag between her breasts. (Martha Rosler’s deadpan gestures in Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, also come up here – the violence of the icepick.) The pleasure of this work lies in the refusal of transparency, despite the simplicity of the actions.

Iiu Susiraja’s ‘Touchdown by Venus’ is on view at Gratin, New York until 24 January

^{Main image: Iiu Susiraja, Lift Up, Breasts (detail), 2025, fine art archival pigment print, 81.3 × 121.9 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Gratin, New York}