Ruba Katrib

"Subtle yet incandescent rage shimmers everywhere in Susiraja’s output. It’s just one of the many reasons why her art—so mesmerizing, terrorizing, gnarly, monstrous—is incredibly beautiful." –Alex Jovanovich, Artforum Over the past 15 years, Iiu Susiraja has taken photographs of herself in domestic settings, most often in her home in Turku, Finland. Simultaneously seductive, abject, stylized and vulnerable, Susiraja’s works are grounded in unabashed yet private performances for the camera. In these stagings, household objects—tablecloths, umbrellas, hot dogs, bananas, treadmills, rubber duckies and dead fish—become co-conspirators in her confrontations with the lens. Situated between the slapstick and the deadpan, Susiraja’s works locate uneasiness in the comfortable, and vice versa. Published on the occasion of the artist's first US museum exhibition, Iiu Susiraja: A style called a dead fish traces the trajectory of Susiraja's practice from her earliest photographs (circa 2007) to the present. The publication also features poems by Susiraja and an essay by curator Jody Graf. Iiu Susiraja (born 1975) earned an MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. She was featured as the cover story for ArtForum’s February 2022 issue. Her recent solo exhibitions include MoMA PS1, Ramiken Gallery, SKMU Museum, KIASMA, Kadel Willborn Gallery, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, PS2 Gallery, VB Photographic Centre, Ramiken Crucible and Fotogalleriet Format. Her work is in public and private collections worldwide, including at the Adam Lindenmann Collection, the University of Chicago, the Rubell Family Collection, the Finnish Museum of Photography collection, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art and the Finnish National Gallery.

This book reveals the work of the artist and activist Yto Barrada. Her artistic practice draws upon the roles of activist, educator, architect, botanist and anthropologist to explore expressions of communality and individual being. The exhibition presented at Mathaf focuses on the threads of regeneration and growth moving between architecture, urban transformation, horticulture, experimental education and home economics. Weaving together these interdisciplinary methods of making and discovery, the exhibition articulates desires for equality, self-expression and exploration. The artist’s personal and collective experiences of Tangier are expressed through a multitude of mediums to investigate the structures and systems of life in that city. These work in parallel with similar investigations by the artist into systems in the US, to compose a critical and poetic reading of overlooked histories and realities. Barrada’s works in this exhibition offer an open dialogue on the possible restitution of basic democratic ideals such as shelter, sustenance and communality. Barrada’s work offers a mode of associative thinking and making, emphasising the right to exist, learn and shape the world around us. In the galleries, her works live together, presenting starting points for possible collective narratives, which recirculate within the spaces as a composition and as new stories in themselves. Text in English and Arabic.

Erro, Iceland s most prominent painter, receives long overdue critical attention for his contributions to international Pop, late Surrealism, and contemporary figurative painting in this sumptuous monograph. Since introducing exclusively source-image-based painted collage to the European Pop movement in 1959, Erro has produced an influential body of work mining cartoons and art history on canvases marked by political satire and his own cheerfully dystopian observations of human nature. Prescient and timely, Erro s paintings are marked by a voracious consumption of imagery synthesizing a hallucinatory vision of contemporary visual culture. Often compared to Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, Erro s multifigure narratives, refusal to commit to a singular style, and obsession with cartoons set his practice apart. An essay by Ruba Katrib connects Erro to today s figurative-painting practices, and a chronology by Danielle Kvaran traces his wild figurations of history and subjects, ranging from Winston Churchill to contemporary music icons. Newly photographed details and a concentration on Erro s canvases of the last ten years offer a fresh perspective to his European audience and a welcome introduction for his American one.