Performance
Sonya Darrow a Zuzana Kantorová: Folk Costume

The Kyjov folk costume, which will be featured in the program on Tuesday, August 27, was made in 2025 by Master Martin Novosád, a recognized expert on the Kyjov costume tradition. This costume was tailored specifically for Johana Merta. However, she will never actually wear it herself — she doesn’t feel ready for that. The Kyjov folk costume is regarded as a cultural heritage of Czech identity. It carries not only historical value but also symbolic weight.

Johana Merta has decided to offer the costume for trying on to Ukrainian women as a gesture of acceptance and at the same time as a way to highlight the costume-like nature of identity. However, anyone who chooses to enter the exhibition can try on the costume.

The dressing process will be guided by Sonya Darrow and Zuzana Kantorová.

SONYA DARROW
An artist, performer, and folklore researcher from Iowa, USA. Her work focuses on folk traditions, wearing folk costumes, and questions of cultural identity. She explores how heritage transforms in a contemporary context and influences the shaping of personal and collective identity.

She collaborates long-term with the Veronica Foundation, organizing costume exchanges from the Podluží region. She is a co-founder of the initiative Folklore is not dead, which runs community workshops aimed at restoring and revitalizing folk dress. She also cares for “worn-out” costumes, not only repairing them but bringing them back to life in new performative and social contexts.

ZUZANA KANTOROVÁ
An activist and performer focused on marginalized groups and various forms of discrimination. Her artistic practice emphasizes equality, non-hierarchy, and principles of degrowth.

She actively opposes oppression and discrimination of subaltern groups and promotes a vision of society based on respect for ethnic and gender diversity, which she sees as a key element of a healthy and just society.

She has long been engaged in the borderlands of engaged performative art. She studied Text and Scriptwriting at the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory and Higher Vocational School and later the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, specializing in environmental sociology and international humanitarian law.