CT / Kostka Gallery / Valentýna Janů: Hold Your Keys Tight

In her work, Valentýna Janů explores how the female and queer experience is inscribed in the body, gesture and space. In her newly presented film, she leaves behind the controlled setting of the film studio and ventures into the depths of a real metropolis. In doing so, she adopts an aesthetic closer to cinema than to video art, openly engaging with the canon of film history.

The central element of the installation is a hybrid film whose protagonist is a woman with keys clenched between her fingers, who resolves to overcome her fear of moving through the nocturnal city. Her stylised appearance draws on noir aesthetics and the superheroine archetype, yet her identity remains deliberately ambiguous. As viewers, we are left uncertain as to whether we are watching a comic-book character with supernatural powers or an ordinary woman. She is portrayed by several performers who take turns in the role throughout the film, transforming her into a fluid being - a “shape-shifter” of sorts, reminiscent of the mutable heroines in Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (2004). In Janů’s work, this multiplicity takes on a fantastical dimension, but it can also be read universally: the protagonist could be any woman, and her story thus takes the form of a collective experience.

The protagonist’s journey takes her through a flat and the streets of nighttime New York, an implied club setting and the abstract darkness of the studio. As she moves through these spaces, the figures of the flâneuse and the nightwalker intertwine - emblematic figures of the modern metropolis whose exclusively male counterparts were granted the freedom by nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture to roam the city fearlessly, day and night. In the Czech context, a parallel can be drawn with the Night Walkers of František Hudeček, a member of Group 42, whose paintings present the nocturnal city primarily as a space for the male imagination, undisturbed by fear. For women, however, the freedom to take the same walk has never been a matter of course, and what served as a source of inspiration for men remained - and remains to this day - a source of risk for women.

The film draws on the artist’s doctoral research into subcultural performance genres such as drag, burlesque and the ballroom scene, from which voguing emerged. Janů finds powerful emancipatory potential in these forms, not only for the performers but also for the audience itself, which shares in the experience unfolding on stage. The cast therefore includes burlesque dancer and choreographer Monina Nevrlá, whom the artist regularly casts in her films, figures from New York’s ballroom and voguing scenes, and stand-up comedian and DJ Nina Tarr.

Janů’s choice of New York as the setting was no coincidence. For the generation who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, this city represents a blueprint for nightlife and magical pop culture. Czech millennials have its imagery seared into their memories through ubiquitous films, TV series and music videos. Rather than simply documenting New York, Janů elevates it into the archetype of a metropolis, an imagined Gotham that never sleeps. Through its references to comic books and slapstick, the film evokes contemporary neo-noir, such as Amanda Kramer's Please Baby Please, as well as the cinematic imagination of David Lynch, constructing a world where the reality of the city at night merges with fantasy and repressed desires.

In her notes on the film, Janů sent me a line from Virginia Woolf’s diary: "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Not knowing what lies around the corner need not signify only a threat; it can also represent an open possibility, a space to be filled with something different. The implied club setting and the journey towards it are situated within the very same nocturnal city where the body remains vulnerable. The keys clenched between fingers are a silent, almost invisible form of self-defence, the casual necessity of which serves as a quiet reminder of persistent inequality. Hold Your Keys Tight is both a reminder to remain vigilant and an emancipatory gesture of determination.

Valentýna Janů (b. 1994, Prague) completed her Bachelor’s degree in photography at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (2014–2017), including an interdisciplinary study internship at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon (2016), followed by a Master’s degree in Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková’s Intermedia Studio II at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2017–2020). Since 2022, she has been pursuing a doctorate at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, researching subcultural performative genres.

Since 2021, she has headed the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. She works with moving images, installations, texts and performances, creating evocative spatial environments that combine video essays with objects, textiles and layers of sound. Her work explores questions of gender, identity, emancipation, popular culture and everyday experience. She received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award in 2021 and the Other Visions Award at PAF Olomouc in 2018.

She has undertaken residencies at ISCP in New York (2021), Pioneer Works in New York (2024) and Launch Pad in Champagne-Mouton (2025). Her notable solo exhibitions include Delusional (Tomas Umrian Contemporary, Bratislava, 2024), Inside Out and Round and Round (The Platform, Antwerp, 2023), Leaving Home, Going Out (Kunstverein Dresden, 2022), Who Looks Out of a Window (Lítost, Prague, 2021), I'm sry, presented as part of the Introducing series (National Gallery Prague, 2018), Is Your Blue the Same as Mine? (Prague City Gallery, 2018) and Salty Mascara (Fait Gallery, Brno, 2018). She has participated in group projects at venues such as Kunsthalle Bratislava, Kunstverein Dresden, FOLD in London, Her Clique in Lisbon, EXILE Gallery in Vienna and the National Gallery Prague, where her film Flowers Between Two Fires (2022) was screened as part of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the EU. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery Prague, the Prague City Gallery and the Havrlant Art Collection. She lives and works in Prague.