Valentýna Janů (born 1994) creates atmospheric installations, films, and performances that draw inspiration from popular culture and often revolve around choreographing the body within cinematic landscapes. Her work playfully engages with pressing questions shaped by technology, patriarchal systems, and climate change, exploring connections between individual daily struggles and broader global perspectives. Despite its critical lens, Janů's art radiates a persistent sense of romantic optimism.
Janů graduated in photography from Prague’s FAMU and continued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, focusing on intermedia work under the guidance of Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková.
Janů has presented her work at EXILE Gallery in Vienna (2019), the National Gallery Prague (2018), and AQB Project Space in Budapest (2018). She received the Other Visions award at PAF Olomouc and is a recipient of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Since 2021, she has led the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. The artist lives and works in Prague.
Valentyna Janů
Moving on to Valentyna, I suddenly felt like Bella Freud in her Fashion Neurosis podcast - because studio visits always contain that mix: part therapy session, part interview, part performance. Time-limited intimacy. Oversharing contained within the architecture of professionalism. And always, the whispers- as Oprah would say- the subtle gestures that signal what might later matter.
Sitting with Valentyna is entering another cosmos. Her temporary studio was already an ecosystem: fabrics destined for sculptural forms; a moodboard of reference images pulled from fashion editorials, film stills, and visual culture; fragments of dialogue and scenes for her developing script. Her work moves across installation, sculpture, performance, and film, driven by a persistent reconfiguration of domesticity, gendered labour, and the emotional architectures of interior spaces.
Her forthcoming film extends this logic into a cinematic collage: a hybrid of genres, references, and moods that sometimes cohere and sometimes fracture deliberately. Centred on a woman - a superheroine with no particular superpower - the film borrows from comics, experimental cinema, and pop cultural mythologies. Valentyna spoke of darkness: as a site of danger and safety, as a temporal zone where vulnerability becomes both heightened and suspended. Her reflections brought me back to Himali Singh Soin’s now-archival Instagram quote: “In war, the dark is at nobody’s side; in love, the dark confirms we are together.”
Valentyna’s questions are existential and infrastructural: Should the film be shot in New York, with all its cultural baggage, its mythologies, its symbolic weight for an Eastern European artist? Should it live in a cinema or a gallery? How does one make a film flexible enough to unlock funding across multiple systems? The residency provided space for these questions to surface without urgency, to be held, reworked, and allowed to remain unresolved.
Text by Akis Kokkinos, Visiting Curator, Launch Pad LaB, Autumn 2025
Valentýna Janů, Exhibition view: Delusional, 2024, Tomas Umrian Contemporary, Bratislava
Valentýna Janů, Regrets, 2024, Upholstered object, textile, plywood, foam, batting, upholstery nails, sequins, 60 x 60 x 5 cm
Valentýna Janů, Hair Flip, 2021, Exhibition view: Jindřich Chalupecký Award 2021, Moravská Galerie, Brno. Photo by Daniela & Linda Dostálkovy
Valentýna Janů, Snap, performance, 20 min. Performed & choreographed by Valentýna Janů, Monina Nevrlá, Zizoe Akopjan Veselá. Music mix by New Magic Media, PAF Olomouc, 2023.
Photo by Tomáš Kozohorský
Valentýna Janů, Is Your Blue the Same as Mine?, HD video, 12 min, 2018. Collection of Prague City Gallery