Invented Folksongs

This project emerged as a collaboration between three women with different artistic and life experiences, brought together by the fragile theme of female choice and the boundaries of freedom in contemporary society. The exhibition unfolds as a space where personal narratives intersect with collective memory, in which women’s experiences are not only transmitted across generations but also reconsidered.

The starting point of the project is the musical album Invented Folksongs by composer and vocalist Anna Pidgorna, which approaches Ukrainian folk tradition as a living, evolving practice. Drawing on poetic imagery and musical gestures rooted in folk culture, the album gives rise to original songs that address themes of female sexuality, gender roles, violence, and female joy. By combining the raw energy of village music-making with classical and contemporary performance techniques, the music deliberately resists genre classification, existing between folk and contemporary, the archaic and the present.

Within the framework of the project, music functions not as accompaniment but as a catalyst for collective reflection. The shared listening of the album during the opening becomes a curatorial gesture that brings different temporal layers into dialogue. Roksolana Uhryniuk’s graphic works created in 2018, reflecting the transition of a woman from her family of origin to the creation of her own family, acquire new resonance in conversation with the music. At the same time, Olha Kriuchkovska’s illustrations created in direct response to the album capture contemporary female experience, forming a multilayered exchange across media and generations.

The project questions the notion of freedom that contemporary women are presumed to possess. To what extent has the present truly altered the boundaries of what is permitted, if traditional values and patriarchal models continue to subtly shape experiences of choice?

The exhibition takes place in an apartment — a domestic space that simultaneously functions as the experimental gallery The Highbrow. This setting foregrounds the tension between the private and the public, where art coexists with everyday life.

The exhibition layout leads the viewer from established norms toward moments of rupture and “overlooking.” Works addressing the breaking of rules, alternative forms of partnership, and open choice offer neither condemnation nor justification. In the final section of the exhibition, the viewer is left with an open question: does the rethinking of traditional frameworks create space for a new form of freedom, or does it instead reveal its fragility and conditional nature?

Participating Artists:

Anna Pidgorna

Olha Kriuchkovska

Roksolana Uhryniuk