Jan Slanina

Jan Slanina (*1995) is a Czech visual artist whose work focuses on reflecting urgent aspects of contemporary society, particularly the phenomena of labour, technologisation, and their social and political impacts. He studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in Intermedia Studio I under Milena Dopitová, where he develops an interdisciplinary practice situated between installation, object, and digital media.

In his work, Slanina systematically connects contemporary issues with historical references and develops them toward speculative future scenarios. He is interested in transformations of working conditions, the technological rationalisation of human activity, and the ways technologies shape economic structures, social relations, and individual experience. The temporal dimension of his works is unstable past, present, and projected futures overlap and disrupt linear notions of progress.

Formally, he primarily works with the language of digital technologies, installation, and object. A significant role is played by specific technological references that function both as carriers of meaning and as tools of critical commentary. A characteristic element of his practice is his work with neon, which he designs and fabricates entirely by himself. Through this medium, he consciously addresses moments of glitch, failure, and malfunction. Light and kinetic effects do not serve merely as aesthetic elements, but operate as metaphors for the instability of the systems on which contemporary society is built.

His works have been presented in renowned Prague galleries, and he is currently exhibiting at the Prague City Gallery, situating his practice within a broader institutional context. Jan Slanina has thus established himself as a distinctive voice of the emerging generation reflecting the technological realities of today and their social consequences.