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A cheerful television presenter, an animated squirrel, and a picture that looks as though it has been copied from an old VHS tape. In Wiktor Stribog’s world, these reassuring ingredients become the beginning of something deeply unsettling. The Warsaw-based multimedia artist works with animation, illustration, music, and film, making familiar things feel strange enough that you begin to distrust them.

His best-known project, Kraina Grzybów TV—Mushroom Land TV—looks like a children’s educational broadcast recovered from another reality. Its central series, Smile Guide, introduces a young presenter named Agatka and her squirrel companion, Małgosia. But the lessons refuse to behave like lessons, and the comforting format slips into surreal psychological horror. The faded television aesthetic is not simply nostalgic; it makes the experience feel like a half-remembered childhood programme that was never quite safe to watch.

Stribog built the project’s scripts, music, animation, editing, and effects himself, with friends helping bring it to life. He wanted to create something viewers could not stop thinking about—an idea that would spread because people felt compelled to share it. Beneath the apparent disorder was a carefully constructed experiment in expectation, drawing on internet folklore, memes, and unsettling video imagery.

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