UNDER CONSTRUCTION

WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

Titanik Gallery, Turku
14 March - 12 April 2026

At 48, why does she, the artist, want to explore her father’s story? Can she not just be satisfied with who she is now? She’s said that she always has wanted to know more but she feels like a lone island. Her mother’s family has been hurtful and mean when she said she wanted to know more. They said she was looking for a terrorist… and that she was hurting her mother. Growing up without a dad, it feels off, like a missing limb. Throughout the years she scoured the San Francisco library, the internet, reached out to people and organisations and even did a DNA test. “Surprise, you have a sister.” And as she looked for clues about herself in the eyes and features of Iranian friends and acquaintances, she felt fraudulent. Culturally, linguistically she feels like a naive ignorant white blob with just the brown unibrow and a prominent nose as all to prove that she is part of him, this him(ness), the Iranian man who came to America. The brief, violent injection of sperm into her mother’s womb and oops, 9 months later… there she be, fatherless in San Francisco.

And then there is that age old question of nature versus nurture. The ‘male person who raised her’ alongside her mother was as bad as bad can be… invading her dreams to this day. So, shall we hope for nature? No. Daddy not cool. Bad Daddy s (plural). She, the artist, wants to reclaim her daddyness/ lack of daddy out of nothing at all, out of gestures and pain embraced in humor. Humor is the hero that he was not. Survival technique class 101, here you are… in the form of an exhibition as far away as far as can be from where it all started, far from the palm trees and cable cars. Yet that beast of a word hope… hope for some connection. At five years old, at the Catholic school with a massive shamrock outside… she spoke Persian to an Iranian classmate who replied in shock and asked how she knew the language. She shrugged, smiled, and kept playing. It was in her body. Dance dance dance


Documentation by Johanna Naukkarinen
For a link to the Low-Fi Daddy video clip, please email: julianairenesmith@gmail.com

Low-Fi Daddy, 2026 Video, 13.37min

This video presents the artist in deliberately low-quality drag king make-up and 1970s-inspired attire, embodying the figure of the missing patriarch. It is a performative inhabiting—an attempt to occupy his gestures, posture, and imagined presence as they might exist within the female artist’s body.

Layered throughout the video are family photographs from the artist’s childhood: images of her mother’s family—grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends—yet a-consistently, there is no father. These images form a nostalgic thread, marked as much by absence as by presence.

Interwoven with this archive is a recurring image of the artist’s nude torso in a bathtub. This image points to a blunt biological reality: that a child originates from a single sexual act and develops within the body. Stripped of romance or mythology, what remains is flesh—the breasts, the sex, the body as a vessel, carrying life in the aftermath of an encounter.

There is no linear narrative, no clear chronology, climax, or resolution. Instead, the video operates as a moving collage of images, gestures, steps, and breath—an accumulation of fragments that resist completion.