9 September 2026
Berlin Art Week

Curated by Anya Harrison
Opening 8 September 2026, Berlin
Berlin Art Week

 

Bringing together three films from Jakub Jansa’s ongoing Club of Opportunities series, Shame to Pride (2021), Opening Ceremony (2022) and Pumpkinville (2024), Subterraneans examines social hierarchies, collective identity and the mechanisms through which belonging is constructed.

Developed since 2017 across film, installation and performance, Club of Opportunities is set within a fictional “Vegesociety” populated by characters that combine human and vegetal qualities. Through figures such as Celeriac and Avocado, Jansa explores questions of class, cultural representation and social mobility. Humour, fiction and elements of the grotesque allow familiar systems and behaviours to be viewed from an unexpected perspective.

In Shame to Pride, Celeriac enters the privileged world of the Avocados but continues to negotiate the distance between social recognition and a sense of belonging. Opening Ceremony, produced in the context of the Czech Presidency of the Council of the European Union, follows a newly formed union of medicinal flowers and reflects on the relationship between cultural representation, political ceremony and collective agency. In Pumpkinville, Celerist appears as a detective investigating a carefully constructed town centred around the Styrian pumpkin, a regional symbol closely connected to tradition, identity and commerce.

Presented together, the three films trace the development of Jansa’s fictional universe while addressing different forms of inclusion and social organisation. Drawing on television, political pageantry, corporate communication and film noir, Jansa combines narrative experimentation with a critical yet humorous examination of how social roles, identities and ideas of community are produced.