Guilty Party

in three acts

Taking the form of a performative inquiry, the exhibition explores how mythologies—understood through Roland Barthes' lens—transform collective emotions such as guilt, shame, and others into tools of manipulation. Myth, in Barthes’ terms, is not a lie or fiction but a depoliticized form of speech that conceals ideology beneath familiar signs—stripping them of complex meaning and turning them into self-evident, unquestionable truths. Institutions like governments and churches act as myth-makers, using these affective structures to naturalize systems of control. In today's populist climate, where the media distorts facts and history is rewritten to justify power and violence, these myths are not relics—they are evolving, seductive narratives that prey on our emotions to ensure compliance.

The exhibition stages myth to expose it—a counter-myth that enacts what it seeks to dismantle. The title Guilty Party plays on ambiguity: are we speaking of a legal verdict or a celebration of internalized guilt? Both readings are invited. Through embodied experience, the exhibition explores how emotions are socially engineered and unconsciously reproduced by us—the myth consumers. It questions whether passive spectatorship makes us complicit: are we victims of the myth, or do we also perpetuate it by failing to confront its layers and core? In this sense, Guilty Party holds a mirror to our emotional and political entanglement with myth today. 

Iana Pitenko