Touchdown by Venus

Gratin is pleased to present Touchdown by Venus, a solo exhibition by Iiu Susiraja. Since 2007, Iiu has created more than a thousand self-portraits. Staging herself alone in front of a camera—whether still or moving—Susiraja’s images are almost always situated in domestic interiors and most often depict her full body rather than a cropped headshot. She deploys prosaic objects as props—food, toys, furniture, balloons, tape, pantyhose, lingerie—using them to activate her remarkable body. Each image compels the viewer to scrutinize that body: its departure from canonical female “norms,” its folds of skin, its massive presence in relation to the modest scale of the middle-class, homey interiors in which these mise-en-scènes unfold. At first glance, the soft corporeal transgressions in these images disarm through humor; ultimately, however, they release something much darker that lurks beneath the surface. “If a fat person behaves badly in an artistic context, then they are doubly misbehaving,” Susiraja explains. “Being fat is a transgression in itself… An obese person’s simple existence constitutes misbehaving.”