The subversive self-portraits of Iiu Susiraja.
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Susiraja is different: nearly six feet tall, heavy, inescapable.
Being fat is a transgression in itself, she has said.
I venture to be empty and boring, but the camera is more cunning than me.
She is always alone in her photos at home or in her parents house in Turku, Finland.
I dont venture to take any role, Susiraja has said.
I want to be as real as possible.
As blank as possible.
For me, being blank is the same as being real.
Her work echoes that of British artists Sarah Lucas and Richard Billingham.
Lucas turns the camera on herself and stares us down, daring us to respond.
Billingham exposes his drunken family at home in government housing, the realness here being that of class.
There is no one else in this world but her, this visual predicament.
I feel I was a controversial person as a child and also now as an adult, she toldAutremagazine.
The light in these photographs, to which our attention is so overtly drawn, is a co-star.
Clear and vivid, it gives a spacious monumentalism to the work.
No action is taking place, such that the compositions resemble Dutch still lifes.
My starting point is purely the object and how it relates to me, she says.
The object is a tool for experiencing partnerships.
Yet she is also just herself, empty but alive, as she says.
Her face is inscrutable.
She has passed through all these metamorphoses only to remain what she is: a plain fact.
Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish is at MoMA PS1, through September 4.
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