The exhibition "White, Red, Black: The Symbolism of Colour in Folk Culture" will be presented at the "Slavianski Bazaar" festival on July 10th at the City Hall, as reported to BELTA by the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local Lore.
In modern society, there is a vast number of colour markers that can reveal a great deal not only about the surrounding world but also about a person themselves, their status, condition, and even profession. For example, black mourning attire, a pink ribbon for a newborn girl or blue for a boy, or khaki uniforms for military personnel. The aforementioned colour-coding rules have appeared in society relatively recently. At the same time, folk culture has centuries-old traditions of colour usage. "The exhibition 'White, Red, Black: The Symbolism of Colour in Folk Culture' tells about the origins of the white-red-black triad and its use in world culture, about the symbolism of woven and embroidered patterns that adorned the clothing and household items of our ancestors, and about the transformation of concepts of beauty and the active integration of multicolour into folk tradition," the museum noted.
The exhibition, which will be solemnly presented at the forum, is already open. It includes household items (rushnyky, postilky), details of traditional female and male clothing (shirts, headdresses, belts) from the collections of the Museum of the Gomel Palace and Park Ensemble. They illustrate the evolution of ornaments: from archaic ones filled with sacred meaning to decorative elements introduced with the development of civilization. In different regions of the Gomel Oblast, these processes unfolded differently, influencing the emergence of regional characteristics in clothing and the formation of folk costumes. The exhibition features traditional costumes from the Gomel, Dobrush, Kalinkovichi, Zhytkavichi, Lelchitsy, Khoiniki, Bragin, and Vetka districts, each with its own colour palette, harmony, and distinctive features.
"The ethnography collection of the Museum of the Gomel Palace and Park Ensemble began to be formed in the 1920s. Currently, it comprises over 3,000 items. The textile items and folk costumes date from the second half of the 19th to the mid-20th centuries and are the most valuable part of this collection," the museum added.