Girl in a Folk Costume

2024–2026

I critically revisit the image of a woman dressed in traditional folk clothing—an image commonly associated with Slovak tradition, national identity, and cultural heritage. The project begins with a childhood photograph and family video in which I am dressed in folk costume and asked to pose for the camera. This personal memory is placed in dialogue with photographs from the News Agency of the Slovak Republic showing women in folk dress welcoming male political representatives with bread and salt.

By connecting the private family archive with official press imagery, the work explores how the female body has been repeatedly used to represent tradition, folklore, and the nation. The archive is not approached here as a neutral collection of images, but as an active system that determines what becomes visible and how it is represented. Through the meeting of personal and public archives, the project reflects on the power structures embedded in photographic images and the social, gendered, and ideological meanings they produce.

The project takes the form of a spatial installation combining photography, archival material, video, and a wooden cut-out figure. Rather than presenting the woman in folk costume as a complete and fixed image, the installation reveals traces of the body: a hand gesture, a sleeve, an ornament, a fold of fabric, as well as the mechanisms through which this image is constructed.

At the centre of the work is the symbolic gesture of taking off the folk costume. This act is not a rejection of tradition or cultural roots, but an attempt to step outside the male gaze and the visual identity shaped by it. By addressing the way the female body is presented for observation, interpretation, and approval, the project questions the seemingly innocent image of the girl in folk costume and seeks to move beyond the expectations imposed on her. It opens the possibility of being seen and of seeing oneself in ways that are less fixed and less determined by this gaze.

Archival TASR photographs: Henrich Mišovič / TASR, Roller / TASR, and A. Haščák / TASR.

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