As we prepare to say goodbye to 2025, together with our partners at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg, we are thrilled to invite you to the festive opening of You arE variaTions on January 17. YOU are VARIAtions presents, for the first time in the Netherlands, the artistic collaboration between Anchan/Anna Daucíková (1950, SK/CZ) and Christina Della Giustina (1965, CH/NL). Daucíková and Della Giustina met in the Swiss SPA town of Scuol in 1994 with what both recall as an "electric handshake" in the middle of the night. Following that nocturnal encounter, the two began an artistic, intellectual, and romantic exchange that would profoundly shape their lives, both personally and professionally.

Emerging from the artistic and activist networks that were reshaped after the fall of the Berlin Wall, their exchange unfolded across different cultural contexts: starting in Switzerland, followed by the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Ukraine, Italy, and the Netherlands. As active members of feminist and lesbian circles, their practices were formed by the struggles and desires of those years of opening, hope, and acceleration between the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the new millennium. The exhibition looks back at those seminal years from the perspective of the present, emphasizing how their engagement with feminist, queer, and ecological urgencies resonate powerfully today.
 

The exhibition unfolds in three variations, echoing the artists' explorations of transformation, interstitial thinking and processes of becoming. Every month, certain works shift within the space—disappearing and reappearing in new formats—and, in doing so, tracing the artists’ experiments across video, photography, drawing, and installation. Undoing fixed identities, constructs, and national idioms, the works open onto an emergent, corporeal language. Hands and mouths, words and water, chains, glass, and stones become characters that speak through the space of Vleeshal, forming a living body-language.

YOu Are VaRiations is curated by Martha Jager and Sara Giannini and realised in three variations: variation I (18.1—8.2.2026), variation II (9.2—1.3.2026), and variation III (2.3—22.3.2026). As one of the main commissions of If I Can't Dance Edition X on Body as Memory, the exhibition is part of a wider collaboration between Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and will be followed by a presentation at If I Can’t Dance and PuntWG in October 2026.
 

YoU ArE VaRiAtIoNs
Exhibition 
Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art
18 January – 22 March 2026
Opening on 17 January, 15–17:00hr 
 
Accessibility information: 
- Vleeshal is on the ground floor and access to the exhibition is step free
- Bathrooms are not wheelchair accessible and don’t include a baby changing table. Both are available at Café Restaurant MarktCafé (80m from Vleeshal).
- Carers, supervisors and attendants enjoy free entry. Assistance dogs are allowed.
- The exhibition features video, photography, drawing, text, and installation. Sexual imagery and references are present throughout.
- Videos do not contain spoken language
- An audio-version of the exhibition text and of the work descriptions in Dutch and English is available at the entrance desk as well as a large-font wall text.
 

Image: Anchan/Anna Daučíková looking at Acquabelle II, an installation realised with Christina Della Giustina at Projekt Raum, Zürich, 1995
 
Image description: Anchan/Anna Daucíková is observing the installation Acquabelle II. They wear a brown long-sleeve top and loose beige pants. With one hand leaning against a white wall and the other hand in their pocket, their posture appears slightly hunched, and their face is not visible. Along the dark floor, several A4 sheets of paper are arranged in a row against the wall, each held in place by two industrial bricks positioned on the edges of the paper. The overall atmosphere is quiet and contemplative.
 

This project is made possible by the generous support of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Mondriaan Fund, and the municipality of Middelburg.