ART CENTER AHJO, HIILI-ROOM: TIIA-RIIKKA HIETANEN - FRUITS OF THE FLESH

TIIA-RIIKKA HIETANEN: FRUITS OF THE FLESH

“I want my body to be seen, quite simply. I want to place it before people’s eyes, painted on canvas, as my own vision.”

Visual artist Tiia-Riikka Hietanen paints and works in printmaking. The works in this exhibition were created during December at the Old Mine residency in Outokumpu. Executed in acrylics and mostly large in scale, the pieces address fat corporeality with its joys and complexities. In the exhibition, the fat body—reviled, marginalized, diagnosed, pushed aside, medicalized—takes up space and is visible without being subjected to pressures to change.

Tiia-Riikka Hietanen is a visual artist from Turku as well as a teacher of Finnish language and literature. For her, making art is a way of giving form to the inner world so that it becomes perceptible to others, and of extending influence from the private to the public. In her recent works, she has explored themes such as fat corporeality, the right to exist and be seen, and her relationship with the city of her heart, New York.

@tiia_riikka_hietanen