About this Event
PAF is an international curatorial platform focused on contemporary art and the moving image. This year, PAF follows a theme of Bestiary, exploring moving image as an unstable field of hybrid forms, and asking how images are classified, circulated, and transformed by technologies, institutions, and regimes of seeing.
Janů will present a new video which draws on performative nightlife culture and the visual language of neo-noir. The cinematic work follows a female protagonist as she leaves the safe confines of her home, and enters the nocturnal metropolis. With keys clenched in fist, she traverses the city, navigating a space and experience defined by both vulnerability and emancipation. At Pioneer Works, where the video was partly filmed, live performances will periodically activate the video screening.
Known for athletic performances that push the boundaries of art categorization, Fröhlich will scale the architecture of Pioneer Works. Starting from the first floor, the artist will climb across the three-storied building, as though to reveal an alternate dimension defined by its own spatial rules and forms of perception .
About the Artists
Valentýna Janů’s installations, films, and performances are narratives full of hope and reflective essays in one. They address fundamental questions and challenges of life from a personal perspective, creating scenic arrangements that often feature moving image. Janů’s artistic focus revolves around choreographing the body within cinematic landscapes, drawing inspiration from popular culture to create unexpected societal fantasies while critically examining the interplay of stereotypes and archetypes, choices and clichés. In 2018, she received the Other Visions award at PAF Olomouc and is the holder of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize. Since 2021, she is co-head of the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno.
Vojtěch Fröhlich works with installations and live event gestures. Since his early works, he exposed himself to physically and mentally challenging situations often related to climbing. His practice is not only about the physical act itself – through quasi-ritual exercises, he examines and contextualizes situations that unfold for himself as well as his surroundings, while exploring the limits of art categories. For several years, he has been developing Klub AVU, a project balancing on the line in between gastronomy, performance and live sculpture. In 2015, he was a finalist of the Jindřich Chalupecký Award, and completed a residency at Villa Arson in France and at Triangle Arts Association in NY. In 2022, Fröhlich created the project Pauza in the closed Czechoslovak Pavilion during the Venice Biennale to raise awareness of the institutional system gaps.
About PAF
PAF is an international curatorial platform focused on contemporary art and the moving image. Based in the Czech Republic, PAF can be understood as a dynamic research platform that continuously questions and expands the ways in which performativity can be approached—not only in relation to the moving image—and how it can be exhibited in the context of ongoing technological transformations. PAF commissions and produces new works and projects, working with international artists across contemporary art, film and music. Its main project is PAF Olomouc, held annually in December.
This program is made possible with support from by the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and the Czech Centre New York. Valentýna Janů’s video installation is co-produced by Mannschaft with the support of the Czech audiovisual fund, The House and Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague.
Event venue & nearby stays
Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, United States
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