Jakub Jansa is a Czech artist working across film, installation and performance. He builds fictional environments in which narrative, architecture and live action become tools for examining social structures. Humour, absurdity and grotesque imagery often soften the surface of works concerned with class, ideology and power. His long-running Club of Opportunities cycle uses recurring characters and invented situations to explore aspiration, status and the unstable stories through which people understand political life. Jansa’s exhibitions are conceived as complete settings rather than collections of separate objects, guiding visitors through staged encounters that blur cinema, theatre and the gallery.
In 2026, Jansa represents Czechia in the shared Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale. The Silence of the Mole, developed with the Slovak duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko and curator Peter Sit, centres on Mr M., an ageing performer identified with a familiar fictional mole. Jansa’s film follows this figure as childhood imagination is turned into cultural diplomacy and soft power. Sculptural instruments, architecture and moving image form a single installation in which silence becomes both constraint and possible refusal. Presented from 9 May to 22 November 2026, the project also marks the centenary of the Czechoslovak Pavilion and extends Jansa’s interest in the ways institutions shape identity and public representation.