MIDDELBURG.- YOu are varIAtionS presents, for the first time in the Netherlands, the artistic collaboration between Anchan/Anna Daučíková (1950, SK/CZ) and Christina Della Giustina (1965, CH/NL) — a dialogue that began in the mid-1990s and continues to this day. 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 across three variations, echoing the artists' explorations of transformation, interstitial thinking and processes of becoming. As such, the exhibition traces the artist's experiments in performance, 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. With their friendship as a curatorial principle, YOu arE VAriations also offers an exercise in feminist art history, shifting attention from individual authorship to the often-unacknowledged roles of networks, friendships, and collaborations. In this sense, the exhibition understands the artists’ trajectories as membranes that breathe, change, and morph through dialogue — and ultimately through life.

The project is the result of a transregional collaboration between Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam — two organizations engaged with feminist histories, experimental curatorial processes, and performance-based methodologies. Reflecting this constellation, the project unfolds in two moments: an exhibition at Vleeshal (January–March 2026) and a performance-based presentation at If I Can’t Dance and PuntWG (October 2026).