Jakub Jansa: Be Careful Where You Enter

It begins almost like a ridiculous fairy tale. Funny at first. Then… less so. Somewhere along the way, it becomes hard to tell who exactly we are laughing at. In the world of Czech artist Jakub Jansa, celery is ashamed of its origins and dreams of joining the elite society of avocados; a harmless mole from children’s culture suddenly becomes an instrument of cultural diplomacy. Jakub Jansa’s online solo exhibition at CIFRA runs from September 16 to November 10, bringing together eight episodes from his long-running "Club of Opportunities". The latter also forms part of the project with which Jakub Jansa and Selmeci Kocka Jusko represent the Czech Republic and Slovakia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. An uncomfortable possibility begins to emerge: understanding the rules of the game does not necessarily mean escaping them. Recognizing manipulation does not make us immune to it. Rejecting a hierarchy can simply make us want a better place within it. Jakub Jansa’s characters keep rewriting their histories, but every new version risks becoming another role to perform, another story to sell, another voice for someone else to borrow. And slowly, the distance between us and these strange heroes begins to shrink. Their ambitions feel oddly familiar. Somewhere between the celery, the mole, and ourselves, another question appears: who exactly is playing whom? This exhibition is best viewed in order. In "Club of Opportunities", not only the plot changes, but also Celeriac himself: first, he tries to understand why he was cast in this particular role, then to escape it, and towards the end, it's no longer so clear whether he's escaped the system or simply taken a different place within it.