#6 In the studio with Jakub Jansa
Jakub (Millennial, Czech) and I talked about the upcoming Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, veggie dictatorships, and how to pull off a show on a 20 bucks budget.
September 27, 2025. I was strolling through the vast collection of the National Gallery in Prague and came across a trippy Netflix-esque film of a detective drinking at a bar. The detective was a vegetable. Everyone in the bar was a vegetable. Matter of fact, they all lived in a vegetable society. In “a salad system”. Ruled by avocados. Whoever made this deranged episode, I wanted to know more.
That same night, I recognized this series at the Gridline show organized by KODL Contemporary. A friend happened to chat with the artist nearby and introduced us. Jakub offered chocolate as we spoke. He explained that he created an alternative veggie world with Detective Celerist at its center. Celerist tries to infiltrate the class elites led by avocados. He wakes people from their illusions only to stay trapped in his own. He is blue-pilled, red-pilled, whatever-the-fuck-pilled. You can never tell what manic episode he’s going into next. I had so many questions.
So, the next morning, I met Jakub outside his studio. He was discussing some last details with the co-participants of next year’s Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. I asked him how he felt when he found out about getting the commission.
“I cried for 30 minutes,” he said. “I couldn’t tell if it was joy or panic.”
Jakub showed me a couple of excerpts from his films. They were partly in Czech, partly in English. I heard a familiar word.
“What does ÚŽASNÝ” mean?” I asked.
“It means beautiful.”
“That’s insane. It’s literally horrible in Russian.”
“Maybe this is why we always fail to understand one another culturally.”
This conversation was edited for clarity.
Jennifer: Celerist is meant to be the voice of reason in this fucked up veggie world, but out of context, he sounds deranged and like a conspiracy guy. How comes?
Jakub: Pumpkinville was a commission for Steirischer Herbst. The stylized, noir-like voice is meant to expose the mechanisms behind the current rise of the far right in Europe. From an intellectual perspective, the film often works with familiar ideas about neoliberalism, rising rents, and the housing crisis — elements that we can easily read as clichés. The film knows that it’s telling a cliché and uses this stylized voice as a distancing device: it breaks the fourth wall while still speaking clearly, because it was made for a broad audience.
It’s interesting to hear that for Gen Z, this kind of stylization can already carry a different connotation — that of a conspiracist. But that’s probably fine. It’s possible that the world is already so turned upside down that even when you try to say something obvious, it ends up sounding like fiction. Pumpkinville is basically a Truman Show of the Global North, built on fake stability, invented traditions, and carefully maintained illusions.
Jennifer: Your work made me think of a New Yorker article about how cinema is literalist these days: The interpretation is served on a silver platter. There’s no space for subtlety or ambiguity. And it’s hard to allow oneself ambiguity when everything is split into snippets. Is context a luxury these days?
Jakub: It’s interesting how you put it. I think context really is fragile today, maybe even a kind of luxury. Not because ambiguity disappeared, but because it’s constantly being misused. For a long time, I worked with blurring reality and fiction, and back then, it felt productive and critical. But that strategy has been hijacked. The endless “what is real and what is not” is now the everyday language of the deeply normalised far-right. Lately, I’m more interested in expressing things more directly and without the constant urge to push everything to the edge. And honestly, I find the constant edgelording simply exhausting.
Jennifer: There’s a moment when Celerist shakes the reality TV star Pumpkin and tells them the truth about which world they’re living in. That it’s just a show and not the real world. I wondered: Isn’t a wakeup call odd for 2025? Telling people they live in a constructed world?
I noticed this in my own work: I’m enjoying a moment, having a fun or interesting experience, and then I’m thinking of how I could turn this into content. I observe how I’m building my own Truman Show. Do you think that this is something that more people have going on right now?
Jakub: Absolutely. I think you’re right, the classic “wakeup call” doesn’t really work the same way anymore. It’s no longer about revealing that the world is constructed, because most people already know that. The shift is that we’re no longer trapped inside a Truman Show against our will, but actively co-producing it. We curate ourselves, we perform continuity, we turn lived moments into content almost automatically.
That scene with Pumpkin isn’t meant as a heroic revelation where truth suddenly sets someone free. It’s more about the awkwardness and exhaustion of that gesture today. Celerist still believes that naming the structure might change something, but Pumpkin can’t or won’t process it. The show isn’t a secret anymore; it’s a comfort zone, an economic model, sometimes even a survival strategy.
Jennifer: I thought it was curious that the fancy veggies rule the world, while dull, simple veggies like Celerist and potatoes are stuck in the working class. This is so Millennial-coded. Like those memes blaming Millennials for the economic decline because they buy avocado toast instead of real estate.
Jakub: Oh yes. As I developed this character, Celerist gets to a point where he gets invited to the avocado toast…
Jennifer: Pun intended?
Jakub: Yes, I like it when something works as a simple joke that points at something quite specific socially. Avocado toast is funny, but it’s also a clear symbol of taste, aspiration, and imagined class mobility.
And so Celerist gets into a socially elevated standing. At that time, I was reading a book by Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims. It’s a beautiful retrospective autofiction about going back to the small town you’re from and then trying to make it in the academic world. That really resonated with both my own situation and Celerist’s story.
The moment when Celerist gets invited to the avocado toast is the first time someone actually cares about this formerly radicalized vegetable. He’s just gone through a progressive shift and is suddenly experiencing a kind of class coming out. And that’s exactly the moment when he’s invited to the avocado toast.
Jennifer: So Celerist gets accepted into the avocado elite. But he can never become an avocado. Is this part of the metaphor? The impossibility of class climbing?
Jakub: It’s more about describing the power mechanisms you need to observe and overcome. And all the steps you had to take to transform yourself. It’s more like a review of the bigger picture of the hierarchy. It’s also some kind of coming out when you pronounce your real background, your real position, and understanding of these power dynamics in society. This project is a constant learning experience for me. I can learn about myself; I can learn about the context of the problems I’m experiencing. I’m somehow healing and learning through the work.
This struggle of “making it” wasn’t only a narrative; it was part of the process itself. The whole body of work started as a one-day improvisation, and then it slowly found itself sitting at more and more exclusive tables.
Jennifer: In what sense?
Jakub: It reflected my own economic situation as a young Millennial artist. Around 2015/16, just after finishing school in Prague, there was a strong trend toward ambitious, high-tech art, complex installations, new technologies, big production demands. I quickly realized that to even enter that territory, I would need something like 5 million Czech crowns (around 200,000 euros). That simply wasn’t my reality. My budget for that show was 20 euros. So I accepted it as a self-imposed challenge and started working from those limits.
In the morning before the show, I was walking around the district and found this vegetable in a shop. A celeriac. I bought like 20 kilograms; it was so cheap. And it was strange. It was like a weird-looking alien, and nobody cared about it.
It was on the lower shelf of the supermarket. And on the opposite shelf, of course, I saw the highlight of my Millennial life: the avocados. Avocado toast was peak Millennial in 2015. It was shifting the hipster culture. Especially here in the Czech Republic, avocados were something super new. Nobody knew what to do with them. It was just fancy, expensive, and had no taste.
And so, I called my friend, philosopher Kamil Nábělek, who is a particular person with a strong character, and asked him to do a five-hour-long lecture about the ontology of celeriac.
Jennifer: That same day?
Jakub: Yes. He came up with a whole theory of the celeriac root and completely improvised it from the ground. And this is how he somehow introduced Celerist to this whole project. And then we developed episodes into a series. It’s like Netflix but for galleries.
From the very first episode, there was always a tension between what we usually label as “high” and “low” culture. The first episode took place in a gallery context in Prague, but I didn’t want everything to happen in a clean, polished exhibition space. Right next door, there was a slightly rough bowling bar that I genuinely liked, so I invited the gallery audience to move between these two worlds.
There were regular customers bowling and a friend of mine, an amazing pianist, was playing a Rihanna song, We Found Love in a Hopeless Place, on a harmonium. In that setting, it suddenly sounded almost sacred, like church music, a kind of baroque remix happening in a bowling alley.
Jennifer: I can’t imagine those first works were low-budget. They look so sophisticated. Those masks and everything?!
Jakub: I was waking up at 5:00 AM and going to bed who knows when. It was hardcore dedication for my fairy tale mission. I built a lot of stuff for no money and recycled a lot of material. Prague has a lot of film productions going on. You can call them, and they might give you some props for your project.
Jennifer: Was it that easy? Or was it more like, you can rent this, but that will be 10k per day?
Jakub: If they trust you, but I dunno... I was just lucky. I called some people, and they believed in me. The only thing I had was dedication. When people see motivation, they wanna be part of that energy. And they are willing to help.
But there’s also a downside because you don’t want to “use” people and make them work for free. I was doing everything I could to get some budget to pay people, not to be this asshole that makes people work for him for free. But later, we got bigger budgets to do episodes such as the one you saw at the National Gallery. That was the first time I could finally pay people. But I was also super nervous because when you don’t have any money, you can’t waste it. And once we had that 7,000 euros per shooting day budget, I was nervous all the time.
Jennifer: How is your filming process? I was fascinated by how pronounced the colors are.
Jakub: Some videos are shot on 16mm film, others are digital. The 16mm footage tends to feel much more vivid, while the digital material is heavily post-produced. I love working with color. It’s also a reaction to what photography and visual art used to look like in Prague when I was in school.
At that time, the Czech art scene felt extremely restrained. It was mostly black and white, very post-conceptual, and visually quite dry. Embracing color or even just presenting something openly colorful was basically a no-go. It almost felt forbidden.
Jennifer: So you’re preparing your presentation at the Czech and Slovak Pavilion in Venice for 2026. What can we expect?
Jakub: I’m representing the pavilion together with the duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko and curator Peter Sit. We were fortunate to choose our curator ourselves and decide how we would collaborate. We are two countries sharing one pavilion — Czechia and Slovakia — and 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of our pavilion. That’s why we’re preparing a joint presentation.
Together, we share a strong interest in exhibition architecture and dramaturgy. I work more with film this time, while Selmeci Kocka Jusko focus on objects and installation, but we constantly consult each other and discuss the creative process together. So far, it’s been a very enjoyable collaboration that I’m deeply grateful for.
The theme that brought us together is cultural representation. The title is gonna be The Silence of the Mole. We want to address how cultural symbols of creativity and imagination got hijacked as instruments of cultural diplomacy and soft power… BTW. Do you remember this scandal with Studio Ghibli visuals used as an AI filter by ChatGPT?
Jennifer: You say that as if that was so long ago. But yeah, I remember. Right at the beginning of the second Trump administration…
Jakub: It feels like that was ages ago, but it happened just a couple of months ago, right?
Jennifer: This is how everything feels right now.
Jakub: At that time, I felt like my childish innocence was being stolen by everyone on the political spectrum, and my fairy tale world entered some kind of political propaganda. I saw Trump using that filter. I saw Putin using that filter. I saw everyone across the spectrum using it. And now we have this Lalabu…
Jennifer: Labubu.
Jakub: Lalabubu.
Jennifer: Labubu.
Jakub: Labubu.
Jennifer: Yes.
Jakub: Which I think is also some kind of tool of cultural propaganda from China...
Jennifer: Wild take, but I see where you’re going with this. So how is it connected to what you’re gonna do in Venice?
Jakub: We were inspired by The Little Mole, this Czech kids cartoon. After the inventor of the cartoon died, the family sold the license to China. They did a 3D version with a panda, so it was the mole and a panda. Just like Labubus are used for cultural propaganda, so is the protagonist of our presentation.
So, our central figure is Mr. M., an old performer who has played this iconic character, the Mole, for his entire life. He got harnessed for political purposes and made into a mouthpiece for diplomatic interests at some point.
There’s gonna be a film where you see Mr. M. performing in the Giardini, trying to communicate with the audience, and everything slowly starts to fail. The story unfolds around this whole exhaustion of representation and loss of authenticity. And the project also responds very directly to the rise of conservative forces in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Jennifer: I need to know: Seriously, what’s in the water you guys drink here? How come that, in this conservative environment, as you say, artists like you create such an amazing output?
Jakub: I don’t know. Maybe there is a strong tradition of Kafka, Švankmajer, Chytilová or Krumbachová…haha…There was also strong feminist scene in Czechoslovakia in the 70s. We clearly have a tradition of retelling established narratives and of working within our own cryptic, imaginative world.
Jennifer: In what sense?
Jakub: We had a strong, idealistic, and reformist socialist tradition, which was abruptly cut off by the years of hard normalization after the Soviet invasion in 1968. After 1989, there was a brief moment when a “third way” seemed possible, but very quickly the decision was made to simply update ourselves to an imported American hyper-capitalist model. Today, our society is highly McDonaldized, and at the same time we still have free public education and accessible healthcare—things the US can only dream of.
You are amazed by the scene here; you see an idealization of who we are and how exciting it is to be here. But as you can imagine, I’m skeptical about what I experience here. On the one hand, it’s a fantastic and romantic environment where people are creating something from nothing. But on the other hand, to do something from nothing all your life is difficult and exhausting. It’s hard to be far away from the cultural center, to be on the periphery. We have no resources. It’s really just trading this for that sometimes.
Jennifer: It sounds like the only problem, if I may put it like that, is the lack of funding. Everything else seems to be in very benevolent condition…
Jakub: Yeah. You can produce at great quality work here for approachable money. You have a great scene with great people, everything else is perfect… but the market is largely oriented toward more conservative painting, often with a nostalgic, modernist aesthetic.
Jennifer: I would also like to hear your take on another thought. I was talking to two art scene friends of mine who are also Eastern European. And we talked about this intriguing focus on craft in Eastern European contemporary art. Which is not kitschy, but experimental and rooted in appreciation. It’s as if the leading question is always how one can adapt the material and technique to the new contemporary art world. And my friends argued that Americanization didn’t happen as quickly and drastically in Eastern Europe as it did in Western Europe, which is why a lot of skill and craft got preserved and were passed on. What do you think?
Jakub: I think as a Gen Z entering the Czech scene for the first time in 2025, you are already seeing a post-Instagram, post-art blogs generation of artists who are rediscovering craft and form and have confidence in doing something formal.
In the early 2010s, just at the beginning of Instagram, I experienced an art scene with just a few art blogs and no connection to the environment outside. It looked completely different. And it was more post-conceptual. Really straightforward. No tradition, everything was super political and not formal at all. You had super long, boring videos, which had an important message, but were unwatchable. Same goes for photography back then. Same for painting.
It changed dramatically, and what I’m perceiving now is that all these young talents from the academy are more connected. They are informed. They know what’s going on outside of Prague. They are more conscious about the power structure in our business. They understand the who-is-who and which institutions are important. It wasn’t like that a few years ago. So, I wouldn’t say that what you are perceiving now is a strong, traditional character of the Czech art scene. This is a more recent development.
Americanization happened here as well, and I think it hit strong like everywhere else. In 2024, people were queuing for hours to get fucking Popeye’s when it first opened here! So maybe you’re right, maybe Americanization is a bit slower here. But it is still the main cultural influence we have. It’s Americanized post-social media visual culture. But there is serious tradition as well, for sure. Some kind of modern nostalgia. I think visual art here is more based on nostalgia.
Jennifer: I’m shook that the West still acts as if there’s an ron Curtain. I think formalism is much more interesting here than in the bigger art hubs I’ve seen Westwards.
Jakub: That’s great. If we’re talking about an esoteric “soul of the object,” I believe that the soul is stronger and more visible here. Even when I saw extremely well-crafted work in the West, I often didn’t feel any connection to it. It felt more like a polished product, beautiful, well made, but why should I care?
So maybe what you’re experiencing in Prague is something less constructed, less artificial. The idea that you should make art just for the art market is insane. You should make art because you want to say something or experience something.
Or maybe I’m just living inside the illusion of my own bubble, seeing something here that isn’t really there, and if I lived somewhere else, I wouldn’t even notice Prague. I’m not sure. But for now, I have this strange feeling that something genuinely meaningful is actually happening here.
The Czech and Slovak National Participation will be part of the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from May 9 to November 22, 2026.
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
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