Identity Crisis Network
Identity Crisis Network

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Identity Crisis Network
Anna Daučíková and Women’s Association ASPEKT: Alliances Beyond Identity in Recent and Contemporary Art

This lecture  discusses the political potential of rejecting normative identity, focusing on artworks by Anna Daučíková that center the politics of the body, which were produced in collaboration and as part of networks of the Women’s Association ASPEKT between 1995 and 1997. By using a specific framework of alliance as a strategy that challenges categorization and the binary, it will discuss what political horizons may emerge –as theorist Margrit Shildrick asks – when rigid notions of identity and difference no longer provide the grounds for moral discourse. By looking at works such as I am, are you…ready (1995), Queen and the Lady (1996), Aquabelle I, II (1995-1996), as well as Daučíková’s most recent exhibitions, the paper will assert the importance of politicising the body in relation to the specific concerns that identity and identification brought to feminist networks of ASPEKT. Considering wider contexts of Central and Eastern European art after 1992, it will focus on alliances made through recognising and reconfiguring difference in Daučíková’s work. It will focus on the artist’s use of the self and technology which served to articulate non-normative subjectivity in the heteronormative circles of ASPEKT. By displaying both Daučíková’s work’s future-orientated aspects while also thinking about the failures and possibilities that underpin such interactions, it will show the relevance of her continual refusals of categorisation – while asserting the subject through theoretical perspectives of queer inhumanism and trans theory.

Hana Janečková is a researcher and curator working on the politics of the body, ecology, critical and collaborative curating, and decolonial feminism in recent and contemporary art. She is an Assistant Professor of Recent and Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU), and external curator at the National Gallery Prague (The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, Czech Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024). She was a Fulbright-Masaryk Scholar at IRW Rutgers University, U.S., and the Brooklyn Museum, and co-led Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice, Prague (2018–2023). She was a visiting critic at ISPC and a visiting curator at Residency Unlimited New York, and she curated a number of international critically awarded exhibitions, events, and commissions. Recent publications include Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (Tranzit SK, 2023), Multilogues on the Now (Display, 2022), “Cripping Curating” in Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (MIT, 2021), Animal Touch (ArtMap 2021, ed.) and Diagnosis (Artalk Revue, 2018). Her first monograph, Feminist Alliances and Politics of the Bod,y is forthcoming in autumn 2025.




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Identity Crisis Network

Hana Janečková

Anna Daučíková and Women’s Association ASPEKT: Alliances Beyond Identity in Recent and Contemporary Art

This lecture  discusses the political potential of rejecting normative identity, focusing on artworks by Anna Daučíková that center the politics of the body, which were produced in collaboration and as part of networks of the Women’s Association ASPEKT between 1995 and 1997. By using a specific framework of alliance as a strategy that challenges categorization and the binary, it will discuss what political horizons may emerge –as theorist Margrit Shildrick asks – when rigid notions of identity and difference no longer provide the grounds for moral discourse. By looking at works such as I am, are you…ready (1995), Queen and the Lady (1996), Aquabelle I, II (1995-1996), as well as Daučíková’s most recent exhibitions, the paper will assert the importance of politicising the body in relation to the specific concerns that identity and identification brought to feminist networks of ASPEKT. Considering wider contexts of Central and Eastern European art after 1992, it will focus on alliances made through recognising and reconfiguring difference in Daučíková’s work. It will focus on the artist’s use of the self and technology which served to articulate non-normative subjectivity in the heteronormative circles of ASPEKT. By displaying both Daučíková’s work’s future-orientated aspects while also thinking about the failures and possibilities that underpin such interactions, it will show the relevance of her continual refusals of categorisation – while asserting the subject through theoretical perspectives of queer inhumanism and trans theory.

Hana Janečková is a researcher and curator working on the politics of the body, ecology, critical and collaborative curating, and decolonial feminism in recent and contemporary art. She is an Assistant Professor of Recent and Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU), and external curator at the National Gallery Prague (The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter, Czech Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024). She was a Fulbright-Masaryk Scholar at IRW Rutgers University, U.S., and the Brooklyn Museum, and co-led Display – Association for Research and Collective Practice, Prague (2018–2023). She was a visiting critic at ISPC and a visiting curator at Residency Unlimited New York, and she curated a number of international critically awarded exhibitions, events, and commissions. Recent publications include Nature Red in Tooth and Claw (Tranzit SK, 2023), Multilogues on the Now (Display, 2022), “Cripping Curating” in Radicalizing Care: Feminist and Queer Activism in Curating (MIT, 2021), Animal Touch (ArtMap 2021, ed.) and Diagnosis (Artalk Revue, 2018). Her first monograph, Feminist Alliances and Politics of the Bod,y is forthcoming in autumn 2025.




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