The exhibition Dalmatian consists of twelve self-portraits by Iiu Susiraja. She is covered in bruises in these photographs, taken in her home in Turku, Finland. Each picture features Iiu positioned on her bed, with props, in a series of pin-up style poses. Susiraja holds food. She wears cleaning products. She plays with toys. She reclines, a pale painkiller Venus, recovering. She stares at the camera’s lens, searching the viewer with eyes wide. Her bruises imply violence. She folds her pain into complex psy- chosexual manipulations, confronting her physical victimization and leaving the audience to wonder if this work is humiliation, promotion, actualization, or annihilation. Her efficient humor summons car- toons, film stills, fever dreams, and surreal fetishes, played out gracefully upon the turquoise creases of her rumpled sheets. Susiraja says about these works: “I have created my own horror.”

Iiu Susiraja Finnish, born 1975
Dalmatian is Susiraja’s third solo exhibition with Ramiken. Her work is the subject of a major trav- elling retrospective, originally at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and currently at the SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand, Norway. Her work is in the collections of the University of Chicago, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finnish Museum of Photography, Finnish National Gallery, Wäinö Aaltonen Museum, Helsinki City Art Museum, Stavanger Museum, Gothenburgh Museum of Art, Heino Art Foundation, Saastamoinen Foundation, and was featured in the Rubell Collection exhibition Still Human in 2017. She lives and works in Turku, Finland.