‘dummy’ is a solo performance revolving around personal experiences of shame and the ways in which shame becomes inscribed in the body and across a broader socio-political field. Following an associative flow, the performer moves through fragmented speech, vocal shifts and sonic repetitions, as shame emerges simultaneously as an experience of exposure and withdrawal, and as a site of transformation. Through the use of a loop station, the performer’s ‘mute’ voice as a dummy is replicated, repeated and layered, creating a sonically and semantically multi-layered landscape. A stream of replicas unfolds, within which everything is ‘spoken shamelessly’: from unintelligible verbal fragments (lorem ipsum) to etymological and conceptual shifts. The figure of the dummy functions at times as a mannequin that carries and reproduces others’ narratives, and at others as a crash-test dummy, testing the limits of endurance and awkwardness in the face of repeated overexposure.
Image in reference, dummy, Christina Karagianni, 2026
Christina Karagianni is a dancer, performer, choreographer and researcher based in Athens. Her practice unfolds across choreography and performance, exploring the transformative potential of dance and the political, affective and performative dimensions of the body and voice. Her research focuses on the playful slippages that emerge from the seemingly insignificant: awkward dances, linguistic misfires and associative processes through which meaning surfaces without laying claim to seriousness. She is a graduate of the Greek National School of Dance and holds an MA in Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy from Utrecht University. She has collaborated with artists working across choreography and the visual arts, including amy pickles, Clara J. Borg, Nova Melancholia, arisandmartha, Martha Pasakopoulou, Mariela Nestora, Xenia Koghilaki, Maria Koliopoulou, Iris Karayan, The Callas, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis, Vera Sofia Mota, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Michelle Moura and Michael Klien. CAMOUFLAGE, her first choreographic work, was presented as part of MIRfestival (2025). She is a member of the music collective komminuτέρας (Oyto Arognos, Franck-Lee Alli-Tis) and co-curates the independent platform undercurrent with Elena Novakovits and Nasia Fourtouni. In 2022, she was awarded the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship by ARTWORKS, and in 2026 she was selected as an ARTWORKS Grantee.