BIENNALE DI VENEZIA

The Silence of the Mole project will be presented in the same year that marks the 100^th anniversary of the opening of the Czechoslovak Pavilion. This year, after a period of twenty years, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have agreed on staging a joint exhibition presentation at the 61^st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

The project creators are the Czech artist Jakub Jansa and the Slovak artistic duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko (Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko), and the curator is Peter Sit. The presentation is organised by the National Gallery in Prague (NGP) in cooperation with the Slovak National Gallery. The commissioner is Michal Novotný, director of the Collection of Art after 1945 at the NGP.

Artistic Concept

At the centre of the project stands Mr. M., a performer who throughout his entire life has played the fictional character of the mole – a figure originally aimed at an audience of children. “The Silence of the Mole is a project that examines what happens to the imagination at the moment when it is transformed into a tool of cultural representation. The character of Mr. M. is a personification of care, creative labour, and non-verbal empathy, a form of expression through which he relates to the world. Together with the installation, the film analyses the process in which the poetic language of the imagination is transformed into a tool of ‘soft power,’” the creators of the project explain. At the same time, the motif of the mole’s burrow and the character playing the mole work as a metaphor of how the two small states perceive themselves.

The installation, in which film, sculptural objects, and architecture are interconnected, follows a process in which the main character loses control of himself, the result being that after years of non-verbal empathy, his body and voice have ceased to belong to him. The project also works with silence as a motif of how the imagination becomes a depleted public mask, and raises questions concerning whether empathy itself can function as the sole tool for the transformation of others. The exhibition emerges as a unified environment, which is the outcome of a long-term dialogue conducted between all the members of the creative team. Jakub Jansa’s film is created within a direct relationship to the spatial sculptural installation by the artistic duo Selmeci Kocka Jusko, and the individual components cannot be separated.

The artists Jakub Jansa, Alex Selmeci, and Tomáš Kocka Jusko add the following: “The subject matter chose us. We are reflecting our feelings, the context, the conditions, and the time in which we are preparing the project. We are working with how objects communicate with viewers and how visitors move within the installation. We are interested in the time they spend within the space, and what they will contemplate – even if this process is always unforeseeable to a certain extent.”

Curator Peter Sit views the project as a whole that transcends the Central European context: “The subject matter is highly topical and comprehensible. It reflects situations we are experiencing today all over the world, and viewers will be able to relate to it from a variety of perspectives.”

Jakub Jansa (1989) is a Czech artist who works with film, installation, and performance art. His work combines fiction, humour, and absurdity with a critical reflection on social structures, power relations, and ideologies. In his long-term cycle Club of Opportunities, he focuses on issues of class and power in a poetic yet analytical style. In 2021 he received the Jindřich Chalupecký Award. Among other venues, his works have been presented at the National Gallery Prague, GHMP, Neue Galerie Graz, Pioneer Works, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York, as well as at the biennales in Athens and Ljubljana.

Selmeci Kocka Jusko is the artistic duo of Alex Selmeci and Tomáš Kocka Jusko. In their work they concentrate on the relationship between space, perception, and imagination, creating intermedia installations and ensembles of objects. They examine the themes of labour, exhaustion, and deceleration as forms of resistance against the increasingly frantic pace of the modern world. They have exhibited their work in Prague, Košice, Ostrava, Hamburg, Budapest, Ljubljana, and Tokyo, among other locations, and have also realised permanent installations within the public space.

Peter Sit (1991) is an artist and curator who is currently employed as the artistic director at the magazine e-flux journal. In 2012–2022 he was a co-founder of the APART platform, with which he realised a series of exhibition and publication projects in Europe, the USA, and the Middle East. In his curatorial and editorial work, he focuses on contemporary art, language, education, and mental health. At present he is working on the research project Art in Times of Anxieties and Depressions.

Since 2019 Michal Novotný has been the director of the Collection of Art after 1945 at the National Gallery in Prague, and since 2024 he has also been the commissioner of the Czech Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In addition, he teaches at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. His research work focuses on the identity of Central and Eastern European art. His recent projects include an exhibition of the new collection 1939–2021: The End of the Black-and-White Era with Eva Skopalová and Adéla Janíčková at the National Gallery in Prague, 2023, as well as collaboration with the Centre Pompidou at the MOVE festival: Intimacy as Resistance in the National Gallery in Prague and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Flower Union project in the Council of the European Union in Brussels, both in 2022.

Press release and photographs are available here.

Exhibition is supported by Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic

Partner of the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2026: J&T Banka