In 2008, Iiu Susiraja (b. 1975) began to photograph and film herself in unremarkable domestic interiors—her own apartment or her parents’ home, both in Turku, Finland. Often, the focus of these works is the artist’s performative engagement with the contours and orifices of her own body. Posing with mundane objects to absurd or surreal effect, she creates images that are at once deadpan, slapstick, and deeply empathetic in tone to explore the psychology of self-representation. In these scenes, sausages, rubber gloves, herrings, toilet plungers, and a decapitated teddy bear are among the objects she shoves into her underwear, drapes from her breasts, or tucks between a limb and the folds of her body. Susiraja’s carefully staged tableaux employ the tropes of both the portraiture and still life genres, as well as the vernacular of pornography and editorial fashion photography, all with an understated wryness. The images often evince her training as a textile designer, with brilliantly patterned fabric appearing as a backdrop or prop. Across her work, Susiraja stares at the viewer with an opaque indifference; “I try to reach as blank a state as possible,” she explains. “For me, being blank is the same as being real.” In this way, she presents her body, which she describes as fat, without shame or inhibition, generating a raw space in which to consider issues of beauty standards and taboos, fitness, accessibility, sex, and one’s relationship to oneself. Susiraja’s videos, rarely longer than a minute or two, prolong the scenes captured in her photographs. In a single, uninterrupted take she might drive a toy car over her breasts and thighs; crack an egg between her chin and breastbone; apply butter to a baguette positioned like a phallus between her legs; or pull a vase from a vitrine and lick it. These events are ritualistic, performed with the same quiet inevitability as her photos. Each challenges assumptions around decorum and good behavior with a deep, enigmatic humor that inspires both surprise and recognition. Recently, Susiraja has expanded her practice to include sculpture. Working with 3D printed plastic, she creates hybrid forms drawn from the props and scenarios presented in her photographs and videos: a balloon sandwiched by a hamburger bun; a whoopie cushion cinched with a noose; an eight-ball placed in an ice cream cone. Marked by subtle intervention and droll juxtapositions, these objects offer a farcical appraisal of the commodity and consumer culture.