White Dress

Aksana Veniaminava’s White Dress is a documentary project examining a tradition to keep a wedding gown not only for its sentimental value, but as a protective object — a talisman believed to hold a marriage together. The artist photographs women with their dresses at their homes, years after the wedding day. Together, images and heroines’ testimonies reveal something larger than individual marriages: a collective memory, in which a single garment becomes the vessel for an entire world of meaning.

The White Dress book is not simply a reproduction of the photographic project. It reopens the conversation and invites readers to look again at the decade-old images. It encourages them to consider whether perceptions of the white wedding dress as well as idea, or perhaps the myth, of marriage have changed over time or remained the same.

Contrary to expectations, the book’s cover is not white. It echoes the colour of the ashes left from a wedding dress burned by one of the project’s heroines. At the same time, the book contains a hidden treasure — author’s wedding dress pattern — as an instrument for believers to continue the tradition.

Join this controversial discussion and find out which side your are on — a carrier of the tradition or its opponent.