20/10/2026
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the opening last Friday!
Final Girl
by Juliana Irene Smith
Juliana Irene Smith
is on view till 22.11.2026
Excerpt from:
“ The Island, the Sculpture, and the Rage
An annotation on Juliana Irene Smith’s FINAL GIRL exhibition at SIC by Christine M. Kaiser
You arrive at an island. Not a place to inhabit, but a place to enter and leave. The threshold says so plainly: visitors are welcome. What awaits is Juliana’s performative sculpture Final Girl — a term borrowed loosely from the idea of performative installation, where a work lives in the synthesis of event and object, presence and representation, rather than conforming to either one alone. Tie dyed fabric is draped over wooden furniture, its surfaces layered with photographs — glued, silkscreened, collaged — documenting a childhood in San Francisco. Faces are overpainted, marked with red dots, masqueraded. Multiple video screens, loops both scenes at once, in the same present moment: warm on its surface, glimpses of family time, mundane every day and overlaid with a performative act of dry swimming, the artist wrapped in a golden heat blanket, treading through water that isn’t there. The soundtrack underneath is 90s West Coast horror music, and it carries no fear at all — a choice as precise as anything else in the installation.
Red is the color that the artist keeps returning to — blood, violence, flowers, and ketchup. The exhibition poster itself carries the image: Juliana in a shower, thick red liquid dripping down her face, playful and unsettling at once. One color, doing four or five jobs simultaneously, coexisting none of them cancelling the others. That refusal to let red settle into a single meaning is a refusal of a single history and present demands…”
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The exhibition is supported by Eugène, Elisabeth och Birgit Nygréns Stiftelse, Amos Andersons fond HIAP & Taiteen edistämiskeskus
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SIC is generously supported by Koneen Säätiö Alfred Kordelinin säätiö Taiteen edistämiskeskus & Helsingin kaupunki
Opening hours
Friday: 14–18
Saturday–Sunday: 12–16
