Matinée: IN MEMORIAM BARBARA FRISCHMUTH.

Irmi Horn & Juan Carlos Sungurlian

Literature & Music: Since the founding of kunstGarten in 2004, the renowned Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth appeared here for twenty readings. She passed away on 30 March 2025. Honouring her outstanding literary achievement and her long-standing association with kunstGarten, Irmi Horn, joined by Juan Carlos Sungurlian (oud, bouzouki, guitar), presents the traditional August Matinée. In 2002, Frischmuth wrote the monologue Lily’s Zustandekommen especially for Irmi Horn. The programme opens with a performance by Maria Kardash.

Maria Kardash will present a short performance serving as a foretaste on her upcoming collaboration with musician and composer Marichka Chichkova for the exhibition Hybrid Pleasures. Helen Chadwick, supported by Liesl Raff at the Kunsthaus Graz.
In this performance, alongside movement, voice, and music, threads and needles become full-fledged expressive tools through acts of ‘self-embroidery’, wrapping, and untangling. Drawing on the visual language of embroidery and weaving, as well as the soundscapes of Ukrainian musical folklore, the piece reflects on practices historically coded as women’s labour while gently unsettling the roles, rituals, and expectations they carry. It resonates with the shifting realities of wartime Ukraine, where lived experience continually reshapes inherited ideas of gender, care, and courage.
Maria Kardash is a multidisciplinary artist, performer and cultural scholar from Ukraine currently based in Graz for the PhD studies at Kunstuniversitat Graz. Both her artistic and academic work is centered on the human body in motion and corporeal politics.
The performance by Maria Kardash and Maria Chichkova at the Kunsthaus Graz will take place on 19.09.2026 as part of the closing weekend of the exhibition Hybrid Pleasures. Helen Chadwick Supported by Liesl Raff.
In collaboration with Kunsthaus Graz.

Barbara Frischmuth & Juan Carlos Sungurlian

Barbara & Juan Carlos

Last works: THE BEAUTY OF THE DAY AND NIGHT’S FLY, Residenzverlag 10.02.2025 contains 4 stories.

These small masterpieces of fantasy are at the same time a plea against the exploitation of nature by man.

Blue iridescent beetles, furry moths, brave locusts and flickering dragonflies are the heroes of Barbara Frischmuth’s new stories. But if we take a closer look, the author is not only concerned with carefully observed insects: it is about finely drawn symbioses of man and nature, about rare hybrids between girls and beetles, about talking dragonflies or about what we can learn from the cunning grasshoppers. With loving humor, these stories show us how much we humans are part of nature. Because, the gardener and poet Barbara Frischmuth never tires of emphasizing: Only in a coexistence with nature, which is characterized by respect and mindfulness, do we all have a chance of survival.

The author is deeply rooted in her home town, where she has been living again for over two decades. Her literary garden books tell us that she is also closely connected with nature. Her new book “NATURE and the Attempts to Approach it with Language” is different. Nature and culture cannot be separated from each other. They constantly intertwine, whether visibly or invisibly, occasionally without harmonising. Since time immemorial, man has tried to tame nature, to subdue it. The more spectacularly he succeeds, the less he thinks about how dependent he still is on it. This is most evident in the language we use to try to name and describe nature, whether narrative, poetic, factual or scientific. In her essay, Barbara Frischmuth attempts to show how nature is spoken of in everyday life, literature, culture and science. To underestimate nature would be life-threatening. To appreciate it, even to love it, is a humane realisation. Residenzverlag, 2021

“Your Shadow Dances in the Kitchen”. Aufbau-Verlag 2021, 224 pages also published 2021.

The dexterous musician  will play his oud between the texts and inspire the breadth of thought that Barbara Frischmuth wisely, cheerfully and with humour calls for in her texts, which deal with people’s living conditions.