Valentýna Janů Max the Weather Girl, 2020

Valentýna Janů’s installations, films, and performances are narratives full of hope and reflective essays in one. They playfully address fundamental questions and challenges of life, as she creates scenic arrangements often featuring moving image. Janů's artistic focus revolves around choreographing the body within cinematic landscapes, drawing inspiration from popular culture to create unexpected societal fantasies. While critically examining the interplay of stereotypes and archetypes, choices and clichés, labor, and spectacle, her work remains almost obsessively romantic. In 2018, she received the Other Visions award at PAF Olomouc and is the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. Since 2021, along with Jonáš Strouhal, she has been leading the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno.

Janů’s work is featured in A PROFECÍA. Curated by Filipka Rutkowska as a continuation of Casa Filipka – an ongoing project organized together with Her Clique – A PROFECÍA is centered on an envisioned future through the female gaze; one that enables a more empowered, speculative relation to both time and space, plant, landscape, and animal; one that breaks the brutality of dualistic thinking and binary structures and replaces them with a spectrum, acknowledging and honoring the and rather than the or. Following principles of transfuturism, and emerging from histories like that of Casa Susanna, this exhibition is a frame for repositioning one's own body as the intermediary for a more intuitive knowledge; a knowledge that doesn’t make assumptions but rather listens, looks, smells, tastes, hears, feels, orients, and balances. A knowledge that doesn’t require eyes for seeing but presupposes sentience, non-human intelligence, time, cycles, and the fluidity of being (in its broadest possible definition), and exists within a continuum of experiences and knowledge, through-out (non-linear) time. And as this knowledge becomes accumulated and disseminated, and as personal mythologies merge with predominant norms, feminist histories, ecologies and states of being, through rose-tinged utopian lenses we divine a centered space that is Other – healing, forgiving, holistic, transparent, and visible – in and of itself.