Valentýna Janů: Hold Your Keys Tight

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.