IT

In the context of the 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, this conversation with Jakub Jansa explores the ideas underpinning his artistic practice, in which fiction and reality intertwine to investigate the contradictions of contemporary social systems. Starting from the role of humour and absurdity as critical tools, the interview examines his relationship with institutions and the processes through which he constructs his narrative worlds, tracing the development of “Club of Opportunities”, a project initiated in 2017, through to “The Silence of the Mole”, created for the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Born in Vyškov in 1989, Jakub Jansa is a Czech artist whose practice spans the mediums of film, installation and performance. Through this hybrid language and a strong theatrical component, he develops multifaceted projects in which visual and performative dimensions intertwine to create complex exhibition experiences. Winner of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2021, one of the most prestigious awards for contemporary art in the Czech Republic, he has presented his work in international institutions and contexts, including the National Gallery Prague, Neue Galerie in Graz, Pioneer Works and Anthology Film Archives in New York, as well as at the Ljubljana and Athens Biennials.

THE INTERVIEW WITH JAKUB JANSA

In your work, you address social and political issues by constructing imaginary worlds populated by paradoxical characters and absurd situations, through which you bring to light the contradictions and mechanisms of contemporary reality. Irony and absurdity are tools you use to question what you portray, but they can also risk making it appear acceptable to the viewer. How do you navigate this ambivalence in your creative process? Where, in your view, is the point at which irony risks losing its critical force and ultimately legitimising what it seeks to challenge?
I think this is one of the central contradictions I keep returning to. Humour and absurdity are powerful because they allow us to approach things that might otherwise be difficult to look at directly. They create distance, open up another perspective and sometimes allow us to see the mechanisms behind situations we have already accepted as normal.
But humour is never innocent. It can be liberating, but it can also become a very effective instrument for normalising things that should perhaps remain unacceptable. I am interested in precisely this unstable territory.
In my work, I don’t necessarily want to tell the audience what to think or provide a clear moral position. I prefer to construct a situation in which the contradictions become visible and the viewer has to navigate them. Sometimes the characters themselves don’t seem to understand the world they are part of, which is perhaps quite close to our own experience.
There is always a risk that irony will turn into decoration, or that the absurdity will become entertaining enough to neutralise the critical content. I don’t think there is a universal formula for avoiding this. For me, the important thing is not to use humour as a way of escaping responsibility. I want it to bring us closer to the problem, even when it makes us laugh.

A distinctive feature of your practice, as exemplified by your now nearly decade-long project Club of Opportunities, first presented in 2017, is the construction of narrative worlds that often unfold over time through an episodic structure. Does each new episode respond to a narrative conceived as a whole from the outset, or does it emerge from ideas and intuitions that develop along the way? When do you feel that a project has reached its conclusion?
When I started Club of Opportunities in 2017, I certainly didn’t have a nine-year plan. I had a fictional world, a few characters and some intuitions about the social mechanisms I wanted to explore. But I didn’t know where they would take me.
I tend to think of these projects as living organisms rather than stories that have already been written. Each episode creates conditions for the next one. Sometimes an idea that initially seems marginal becomes central, while something I thought was important disappears completely. I like this unpredictability. It keeps the work alive and prevents me from simply illustrating my own ideas.
There is also something quite interesting about the fact that a fictional world can accumulate its own history. Characters develop, situations repeat themselves, and certain absurdities gradually start to feel almost natural. This is not so different from how social and political systems operate.
I don’t usually know when a project will end. Sometimes it reaches a point where the narrative has exhausted its possibilities. Sometimes the institutional context or the opportunity to work in a particular space creates a natural conclusion. And sometimes I simply feel that I have spent enough time with these characters.
I don’t think every story needs a definitive ending. Perhaps it is enough to reach a moment when you can leave the characters alone and allow them to continue existing somewhere outside your work.

BEING AN ARTIST ACCORDING TO JAKUB JANSA

In your work, you bring together a range of different languages and formats, combining video and installation and often incorporating performance as well. As you develop these complex narrative structures, how important is the dialogue with the curator in shaping the project within the exhibition space?
For me, the exhibition space is never just a container for the work. It is part of the narrative itself. The way visitors move through the space, what they encounter first, what they hear from another room, and what remains hidden all influence how the story is experienced.
This is why the dialogue with the curator is important. I don’t see the curator simply as someone who helps place the finished work into an exhibition. Ideally, it is a conversation in which both sides can influence the direction of the project.
I think this kind of dialogue worked particularly well with Peter Sit, the curator of the Biennale project. We had a very productive exchange throughout the process.
I naturally think about the spatial and temporal organisation of an experience. I am interested in how different elements communicate with each other, and how the visitor becomes part of the dramaturgy.

You have mentioned that in recent years you have increasingly come to identify as a commission-based artist. How does the relationship with the commissioner and the context in which a project will be presented inform your creative process? And how do you navigate the expectations and potential contradictions inherent in more institutional settings?
I have increasingly come to identify as a commission-based artist, partly because many of my projects are conceived in direct relation to a particular institution, location or occasion. But I don’t understand this as simply producing something that an institution asks for: the context is often the starting point rather than a set of instructions. I am interested in what a particular institution represents, what kind of expectations surround it, and what contradictions might be hidden within its own identity. These can become material for the work.
I think the interesting moment comes when you take the commission seriously but don’t necessarily take its expectations literally. There is a difference between responding to an invitation and fulfilling an assignment, and I want to preserve the possibility of questioning the framework in which I am invited to work.
Working with larger institutions also means dealing with different kinds of responsibility, budgets and production structures. Coming from the central European environment, I have sometimes felt that artists are not necessarily given the same opportunities to take responsibility for large-scale projects as their international colleagues. This is slowly changing, but it requires experience and trust on both sides.
I have learned a lot through collaborations with people working in different fields, from film production to architecture and sculpture. I don’t believe an artist needs to do everything alone. On the contrary, I think complex projects become interesting precisely when different experiences and forms of knowledge meet.
Ultimately, I want institutions to take artists seriously, not only as people who provide cultural content but as partners capable of questioning the institution itself.

JAKUB JANSA AT THE 2026 ART BIENNALE IN VENICE

Your latest work, created in collaboration with Slovak artists Selmeci Kocka Jusko, represents the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. You said that, for you, this opportunity was less a final destination than a chance to amplify your voice. How did this perspective inform the decisions behind The Silence of the Mole? How did you engage with the political situation surrounding this edition of the Biennale?
I wasn’t interested in producing a celebratory representation of Czech or Slovak culture. Instead, I became increasingly interested in the very idea of representation and in the failure to represent what is expected of you.
The Mole is an especially interesting character in this respect. He is a familiar, almost universally safe cultural symbol. Nobody expects him to be particularly critical or politically dangerous. But what happens when this harmless figure is suddenly placed in a situation where he is expected to represent something much bigger than himself? What happens when he cannot perform the role assigned to him?
The project also deals with the way imagination can be appropriated and transformed into a tool of soft power. A character that once belonged to a world of childhood imagination can become a national symbol, a cultural ambassador or an instrument of political representation. At some point, the original imagination gets lost.
The political situation surrounding this edition of the Biennale made these questions impossible to ignore. I was aware that participating in such an event also means becoming part of a much larger political and institutional structure. I didn’t want the work to offer a simple commentary on this situation, nor did I want to pretend that art exists outside it.
For us, it was important to maintain a distinction between the silence of the character and our own position as artists. The work leaves space for the audience to make its own decisions, but we didn’t want to use ambiguity as an excuse for remaining silent ourselves. We spoke publicly at the opening, supported Pussy Riot and eventually closed the pavilion in solidarity with Palestine.
I think this distinction is important: ambiguity can be a productive artistic strategy, but it shouldn’t become a convenient political position.

Created for a specific occasion such as the Biennale, The Silence of the Mole incorporates cultural references and allusions to a collective memory that may not be familiar to those who do not share the same cultural background. Now that the Biennale has been running for several months, have you had the opportunity to observe how the project has engaged with an international audience whose members bring different cultural references and perspectives?
I think the project has a way of reaching audiences beyond its original cultural context. The original character is not just a regional character from Czechoslovakia. His films have been distributed in more than 80 countries, particularly across Europe and Asia, and he has become part of the childhood memories of several generations in very different places.
There is also something important about the ending of our film: Venice eventually sinks under water. For me, this opens up the critical narrative beyond the specific story of the Mole or the Czech and Slovak context. It becomes something that can be translated onto the wider platform of the Biennale, and perhaps even beyond it.
We receive an unexpected number of messages every day from people around the world, including countries where the original Mole cartoons were never even broadcast. That is quite remarkable. But I think this is also where the work becomes interesting. You don’t necessarily need to know the original character to understand the situation he finds himself in. The idea of a harmless figure being turned into a representative of something much larger, or being expected to perform an identity that no longer belongs to him, can be understood in many different contexts.

In your work, the narrative often unfolds around characters that help define the imaginary world of a project, such as the Celeriac in Club of Opportunities or the Mole in The Silence of the Mole. How do you choose a character in relation to the themes you want to explore? Do you see these characters and their distinctive features as a means of providing viewers with an entry point into the meaning of the narrative?
I don’t usually start by looking for a character to illustrate a particular theme. It often happens the other way around. I become interested in a certain figure, object or situation because it contains some strange contradiction that I cannot immediately explain.
The Celeriac in Club of Opportunities, for example, started as a rather absurd character, but gradually became a vehicle for exploring much more complicated social and political mechanisms. I was interested in its position as something almost invisible: a working-class vegetable, something that adds flavour but is rarely recognised as the main ingredient. It became a way of thinking about class, identity and the invisible structures that shape our everyday lives.
Interestingly, the character eventually developed a life of its own outside the gallery. When a viral review from the alt-right entered the discussion around the project, the Celeryist became part of a much broader public debate. This was a moment when the fictional world suddenly collided with a reality I couldn’t entirely control.
The Mole operates differently. He comes with a much stronger collective memory and an already established cultural identity. But I was interested in taking this familiar figure somewhere unexpected, almost into a parallel universe. I wasn’t interested in simply continuing the original adventures of the character created by Zdeněk Miler. I wanted to see what would happen if this seemingly innocent figure found himself in a situation closer to the world of Birdman than to a children’s animation.
I think characters can provide an accessible entry point into quite complex subjects. They allow us to approach something difficult through a figure we can relate to, laugh at or even feel sorry for. But I also like it when they resist being reduced to symbols. They should have their own absurdity, weaknesses and contradictions.

In April 2026, you were announced as one of the winners of the Paul Thorel Prize in Naples, for which you will present a new project as part of an exhibition organised by the Fondazione Paul Thorel in January 2027. Looking back at the trajectory that has taken you from Club of Opportunities to the Biennale, are there any questions you already feel compelled to explore further, or new directions you would like to pursue in your future work?
I am increasingly interested in what happens after a work leaves the gallery. When fictional characters enter public discussions, social media or political debates, they can develop a life that is difficult to predict. I find this overlap between the fictional and the real world fascinating.
Perhaps the question I keep returning to is quite simple: how much of our imagination still belongs to us, and how much of it is already being used by someone else?

Alessia Leoni

Jakub Jansa
The Silence of the Mole at the 2026 Art Biennale