CIFRA, a curatorial media art platform, has opened Be Careful Where You Enter, an online solo exhibition by Czech artist Jakub Janša, featuring eight episodes from his long-running project Club of Opportunities. On view till 10 November, the exhibition follows the development of the art series from 2017 to 2024, showing the evolution of Janša’s use of fictional characters, humour and absurdity in the examination of social hierarchy, identity and power.
The exhibition coincides with Janša’s participation in the 2026 Venice Biennale, where he and Selmeci Kocka Jusko are representing the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Club of Opportunities is also a part of their Biennale project, with Janša presenting The Silence of the Mole in the Czech and Slovak pavilion.
Following the Biennale’s opening, critic Jackie Wullschläger highlighted in the Financial Times the artwork as a “comedy film of nostalgia, reproach and flummoxed identity“, adding it to her review of the 2026 edition.
At the focus of the CIFRA exhibition is an unlikely protagonist: a celeriac. Introduced in 2017 in Bowling Bar, the vegetable begins at the bottom of a fictional social hierarchy before becoming the central figure in an increasingly elaborated universe. Over subsequent episodes, Celeriac (and later his alter ego Red Herring) moves through such questions as ambition, class, reinvention and belonging.
The absurdity of the premise gives Janša an opportunity to address more familiar social mechanisms. In 2018, in April Showers Bring May Flowers, young celery roots are tattooed with futures chosen for them in advance. My Name Is Red Herring, from the same year, presents a human-celery hybrid who rejects the narrative of his own origins, only to begin using the mechanisms of power he initially recognised and resisted. In Keeping in Line (2018), Red Herring works at Avocado Bar while aspiring to join the avocados at the top of the vegetable hierarchy.
Later artworks expanded the storytelling beyond individual ambition. By Shame to Pride, created in 2021, Celeriac after having achieved the social mobility he was dreaming about, questioning what has to be left behind in order to enter a new social group.
The most recent artwork in the exhibition, Pumpkinville, created by the artist in 2024, casts Celeriac as a detective working for the fictional Office for the Investigation of False Traditions. His investigation of the Styrian pumpkin leads into a constructed world where traditions, identities and narratives can themselves become products.
All together, the eight episodes showcase almost a decade of Club of Opportunities. Characters change roles and move through the hierarchy, but the structures surrounding them prove harder to escape. Instead of presenting power simply as something imposed from above, Janša analyses how its rules can be internalised and reproduced, including by those who initially tried to resist them.
Jakub Janša’s exhibition follows another recent project presented by CIFRA, In the Shadows of Paradise, curated by British curator and writer David Elliott. Bringing together video works created over the past three decades by 12 artists and collectives from Africa, China, Europe, Japan, Russia and Singapore, the exhibition focuses on changing ideas of paradise through political power, social change, memory, environmental transformation and individual freedom. The project is a part of CIFRA’s wider programme designed to present media art within a curatorial and cultural context.
