MIRA-VEERA AUER














Young female workers (2025-)








It feels like someone is strangling (2022-)








Project Hietsu X LAB (2025)








Biography








IT FEELS LIKE SOMEONE IS STRANGLING 2022-

[Works from the series have been exhibited at Laterna Magica (Helsinki, 2024), LAB Institute of Art and Design (Lahti 2025), Gallery West at Cable Factory (Helsinki 2025), and Gallery Toinen Silmä (Helsinki 2025).]






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     Kuva: Olli Heikkinen




It feels like someone is strangling — is a body of work that comments, through a constructed narrative, on the structures that restrict the position of women and on the reflections of global politics. These reflections extend as far as a small Finnish municipality, Lahti. The whole combines personal and autofictional narration with a photographic series developed interactively with subjects experiencing a development that strips away human rights.

In 2025, in a small Finnish town, young women followed global political developments and various reforms, whose ripple effects suddenly began to be felt also in Finland. They felt as if someone were strangling them, even though they were not geographically close to these political currents. However, the effects of global political flows began to seep into everyday Finnish life as increasingly public manifestations of misogyny.

In January, the Finnish mass consumption product Meta changed its rules so that henceforth a woman may be called a household object on the internet. Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States, and on the day following his inauguration (January 20, 2025), on January 21, 2025, all content tagged with abortion rights and the United States Democratic Party was removed from Meta’s Instagram social media servers. The internet appeared empty on these topics for a moment. In February, some calendar apps removed, among other things, the International Women’s Day marking from their calendars. It felt like all of this could not just be quietly overlooked.









The work is inspired by a time when we experience what it feels like when human rights are weakened or threatened. This happens both at the level of legislation and in the atmosphere of influence. Examples include legislative reforms globally, the loss or threat to abortion rights, and interference with freedom of speech.

Overall, I see a kind of global turning point currently underway regarding the position of women, which needs to be depicted and addressed.

The images continue my photographic series in which I address structural issues related to the position of women through self-portraiture and constructed imagery.