Valentýna Janů: Hold Your Keys Tight

TICKETS

The exhibition Hold Your Keys Tight presents Valentýna Janů as an artist who has long been exploring the gestures, rhythms and body language through which women and queer people create visibility in public spaces, and who now applies this inquiry to the city at night  an environment in which the vulnerability and freedom of the body are most clearly intertwined.

The exhibition’s title refers to the subtle yet universally recognisable gesture of clutching keys between the fingers – a quiet strategy of self-defence adopted by many women on their way home at night, which also serves as a reminder that the freedom to move about at night has never been equally shared. The central element of the installation is a hybrid film, the concept for which was developed during the artist’s residency at Pioneer Works in New York; the script was then written during a residency at LaunchPad in France, and filming took place in 2026 during a residency at the ISCP in New York. Its main character is a stylised heroine drawing on both the noir aesthetic and the archetype of the superheroine; however, rather than assuming the role of a femme fatale - defined by the fascination of the male gaze - she establishes her own distinct identity. She is portrayed in turn by several performers, and so, rather than a portrait of a single woman, Keywoman becomes a mirror of the collective experience. Her journey takes her through an apartment, the streets of New York by night and the abstract darkness of the studio, and her movements critically rewrites the historical figures of the flâneur and the nightwalker, for whom the freedom to roam the city was a matter of course, but only from a male perspective.

The film combines a documentary texture with choreographically stylised sequences, which are based on the director’s doctoral research into subcultural performative genres such as the drag, burlesque, and the ballroom culture from which the vogueing emerged – understood here as emancipatory strategies through which marginalised communities transform fear into a space of autonomy and mutual care. In passages where the image fades into darkness, sound takes on a guiding role: voices, breath, the rhythm of footsteps, the humming of the city, testimony about night-time journeys, and original beats by Johannes Tröstler, who weaves all these layers into a spatial multi-channel mix. At the Kostka Gallery, the film is set in a scenography that evokes the character of a night-time street, where darkness itself becomes the medium of the installation. Here, darkness appears in its physical, symbolic and psychological forms – as an immediate physical experience of the night, as a metaphor for personal and social crises, and as a space to which the female experience has historically been confined.

Valentýna Janů (*1994, Prague) completed a bachelor's degree in photography at FAMU in Prague (2014–2017), including an interdisciplinary internship at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Lyon (2016), and a master’s degree in Dušan Zahoranský and Pavla Sceranková’s Studio of Intermedia Art II at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2017–2020). Since 2022, she has been continuing her PhD studies at UMPRUM, where she is researching subcultural performative genres. Since 2021, she has been leading the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology. She works with moving images, installations, text and performance; her evocative spatial situations intertwine video essays with objects, textiles and sound; thematically, her work explores issues of gender, identity, emancipation, popular culture and everyday experiences. Valentýna Janů is the recipient of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award (2021) and the ‘Jiné vize’ award at PAF Olomouc (2018). She has been a resident artist at ISCP in New York (2021), Pioneer Works in New York (2024) and Launch Pad in Champagne-Mouton (2025). Her major 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 as part of the Introducing 2018 seres (National Gallery Prague, 2018), Is Your Blue the Same as Mine? (Prague City Gallery, 2018) and Salty Mascara (Fait Gallery, Brno, 2018). She has taken part in group projects at, amongst others, 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 Republic’s Presidency of the Council of the EU. Her works are included in the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, the Prague City Gallery and the Havrlant Art Collection. She lives and works in Prague.

Valentýna Janů: Hold Your Keys Tight 
Kostka Gallery

23. 10. 2026 – 10. 1. 2027
Opening: 22. 10., free entry 

Curator: Ján Gajdušek
Production: Nikol Hoangová
PR: Zuzana Kolouchová, Filip Pleskač 
Graphic Designer: Jakub Kučera
 

Hold Your Keys Tight - video installation end credits

The video installation was produced by Mannschaft with support from the Czech Audiovisual Fund, The House, and UMPRUM.

Warning: 
The film makes limited use of strobe effects. 

Tickets: 

100 CZK at bar MeetFactory or GoOut
50 CZK students, seniors, ZTP

The ticket is valid for all exhibition spaces. 
For group discounts (over 10 people), guided tours of exhibitions or press accreditation, please contact pr@meetfactory.cz

Opening Hours: 

MeetFactory Gallery and Kostka Gallery:
Mo–Su 13:00–19:45 (or accordying the programme)