IF I CAN’T DANCE, I DON’T WANT TO BE PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION
Anchan/Anna Daučíková
Christina Della Giustina
yOU aRe VariatiONS
Live event & archival presentation
31 October -
8 November 2026
We are thrilled to invite you to the second chapter of YOU ARE VARIATIONS, a commission by Anchan/Anna Daučíková and Christina Della Giustina, developed in partnership with Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg. The project traces the artists’ collaboration back to their first “electric handshake” in the mid-1990s, exploring how their evolving relationship has shaped their engagement with embodied language, non-binary thinking, and radical openness.
Following an exhibition at Vleeshal earlier this year, this continuation opens a portal into the artists’ performance practices through a live event and an archival presentation extending into the neighbouring space of puntWG. For one week, traces of their collaboration take centre stage, moving between documentation and liveness, past and present.
Emerging from a two-year research process, the project foregrounds the artists’ with performance as a feminist and queer methodology, mobilising records of their work from the 1990s to the present. Photographs, video documentation, scores, ephemera, and correspondence trace the encounter between two individual practices, the collaboration it sparked, and the new pathways it opened over the following decades.
As part of this ongoing process of rediscovery, the artists bring to If I Can’t Dance a new iteration of a recent performance—both the result of, and one phase within, their ongoing dialogue. On the opening day, as the sun begins to set, they enter the archival installation To Whom Do You Listen?, giving presence to something that was, is, and will be.
Opening
31.10.2026, 15–19hr
If I Can’t Dance & puntWG
you are vARIAtions is co-curated by Sara Giannini and Martha Jager and is part of If I Can't Dance Edition X: Body as Memory.
Image: Digital collage by Anchan Daučíková with photo documentation and score of Die Krankheit, a performance by Anchan/Anna Daučíková, Christina Della Giustina and Jana Cviková at Artforum Bookshop, Bratislava, 1995. Score by Christina Della Giustina.
[ID. Digital collage juxtaposing two images. On the left side there is a photograph documenting a performance action by Anchan/Anna Daučíková in which they are cutting glass on a wooden table placed in front of book shelves. On the right side, a graphic score by Della Giustina where three columns of words in German combine the term "Die Krankheit" with other terms and short sentences. In two instances, smaller words are placed on top of the columns with the text becoming less legible.]
