Ukrainian Zigafolk
A group exhibition examining how sacred imagery, national mythology and militarised symbolism enter contemporary visual culture.
Participants: Nika Bartsykhovska, Yuriy Kobenko, Serhii Melnychenko, Andrii Siguntsov, Anton Slobodeniuk and Nazar Sheshuriak.
The exhibition included Andrii Siguntsov’s digital print They and I, combining political portraits with fragments of popular digital imagery.
About the project
Ukrainian Zigafolk explores a “new sacredness” through a collision of national symbols, occult references and the imagery of apocalyptic folk. The term comes from a musical context, carrying associations with militarism, ideological provocation and the reinvention of older myths.
The project assembles an unstable symbolic world: Cossack fantasies, Chornobyl angels, historical figures and bodily imagery coexist in combinations that resist a coherent national picture. Familiar signs become strange, excessive or contradictory. This is an artistic examination of the attraction and unease generated when collective identity takes on a sacred form.
Participating artists were Nika Bartsykhovska, Yuriy Kobenko, Serhii Melnychenko, Andrii Siguntsov, Anton Slobodeniuk and Nazar Sheshuriak. Their different interpretations turn the exhibition into a field of competing images rather than a single statement of belief.