Pop fantasies, unsettling characters, and intimate questions about how we see ourselves and others. PAF New York presents moving-image works by Valentýna Janů and Julie Béna, followed by a Q&A with Janů and Eric Guy Booker.
REGISTERIn Hair Flip (2021), a young woman moves through a dreamlike landscape where pop culture, digital imagery, and private fantasy blur. Drawing on music videos and online imagery, Janů playfully explores femininity, self-presentation, and the construction of identity.
Is Your Blue the Same as Mine? (2018) considers love, loneliness, and the difficulty of understanding another person. A spoken monologue accompanies the choreography of an onscreen figure, asking whether we can share the same reality or see through someone else’s eyes.
In Dirty Shirley (2024), French artist Julie Béna draws on the image of child star Shirley Temple to explore celebrity culture and expectations placed on women and girls. Filmed across Colorado, the short follows a protagonist played by Béna through a surreal world of twisted characters, mid-century game shows, and American road-trip imagery. Beneath its nightmarish humor lies a reflection on self-image, ambition, and self-worth.
Valentýna Janů, Eric Guy Booker, Vojtěch Fröhlich, and PAF curators Nela Klajbanová and Martin Mazanec will attend in person. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Janů and Booker.
Valentýna Janů creates films, installations, and performances that combine pop-cultural references, choreography, and imaginative storytelling. Her work examines social expectations and stereotypes while retaining a sense of humor and hope. In 2018, she and Kryštof Hlůže received PAF’s Other Visions award for Is Your Blue the Same as Mine? She is also a recipient of the 2021 Jindřich Chalupecký Award and has co-led the Intermedia Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology, since 2021.
Eric Guy Booker is a curator and writer whose work highlights art that crosses disciplines and brings overlooked histories into focus. He previously held curatorial positions at Storm King Art Center and The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he edited Smokehouse Associates, a book exploring the Harlem public art collective.
Presented as part of PAF New York: Bestiary. PAF is an international curatorial platform dedicated to contemporary art and the moving image. This year’s theme explores hybrid forms and how technologies, institutions, and ways of seeing shape the classification and circulation of images.
Organized by PAF in cooperation with Czech Center New York.
