A vague yet piercing look of confrontational horror animates the face of a woman, zaftig and underdressed, with piercing blue eyes, an exaggerated frown, and the upswept hair and ruddy complexion of a latter-day Vermeer milkmaid. Because of art history, and especially self-portrait photography by women, it’s tempting to assume it’s the male gaze iiu Susiraja is returning with such confident, casual anxiety. But the truth is, not only men are guilty of judgmental staring, and all who find themselves contemplating this work are eventually implicated.

In each photograph and short (1- to 2-minute) video, Susiraja captures herself performing bizarre, mainly food-related performative actions on her own body. Her settings range from nondescript to carefully staged, with the banality of sparsely furnished domestic sites like bedrooms and hallways—the better to set off the dreamlike oddity of her scenes. She deviates from this aggressive plainness only in the most worthwhile instances, such as with a few settings whose over-the-top trappings of class and luxury lend the proceedings a more theatrical, allegorical dimension. Otherwise it’s beige walls and tan carpet all the way. She’s Finnish, but it hardly matters, she never speaks and there’s no text. You’re pretty much on your own.

iiu Susiraja, Eyes (2017), courtesy Ghebaly Gallery.

The photographs and videos are made in the same way, with a single-shot one-liner and no context or narration. As odd as the images of the artist’s face covered in ketchup or her head festooned with melted ice cream are, the works share a starkness that sets up her jokes. The photographic prints are small by modern standards at only about 11 x 13, and the video projection isn’t much larger. In both cases, the ordinariness and vernacular feeling of color film—as well as the complete lack of narrative or context—serves to underscore the surrealism of the stuff she’s doing with and to her body: tying sausages around her ankles like weights, spitting into an umbrella, stepping on pork chops to tenderize them, playing a drum by peeing on it standing up, putting a whole cheesecake down her shorts. Susiraja does all of this and more without ever losing her staring contest with the viewer. The poignant absurdity of what she does with food and bodily fluids is turned a bit menacing by all this eye contact. It’s startling enough in the stills but in the video, intimately unsettling.

In part it’s a clear challenge to prevailing beauty standards, but it’s not about beauty—or not only about that. How much does her being so overweight influence the picture? Well, since she’s doing all this food stuff it seems we are meant to factor it in, but not without being made very aware that we are doing so. She’s lambasting commercially-driven body images, cheap porn, cam-girls, food fetishists, and fat-shamers; there’s enough go-to-hell for everyone. By acting within the impactful tradition of women artists using their own bodies as the sites of social spectacles, she makes it clear that she is in full control of the situation.