As part of the World Pride 2026 exhibition, Kidnapping, Caucasian Style is a photographic project by Stefan Ragimov. Drawing on his origins in the Caucasus, Ragimov engages folkloric motifs, cultural archetypes and staged photographic constructions to reconsider visual traditions associated with the region. Through portraits and landscapes, he reconfigures established figures into psychologically nuanced subjects, where masculinity is rendered unstable, affective and internally conflicted.

 

The work examines the formation of masculine identity within the Caucasus, shaped by layered structures of tradition, social expectation and inherited ideological frameworks, including historical state narratives and contemporary regional attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Within this context, the series articulates masculinity not as a fixed category, but as a field of tension in which authority, fragility and suppression coexist. Positioned between ethnographic reference and constructed image, Ragimov’s practice operates from within the cultural logic it engages. Kidnapping, Caucasian Style opens a space in which dominant visual regimes are interrupted, allowing for the emergence of marginalised emotional states and queer coded possibilities within a historically rigid representational language.