Various Attachments

Thread is both material and metaphor. It stitches bodies and fabrics together, but also carries ideas of connection, attachment, continuity, and belonging. The performance Various Attachments embraces the double meaning of attachment: as an act of care and intimacy, but also as a condition that can bind, constrain, or define. It integrates the visual language of embroidery, needles and threads, with the soundscapes of traditional Ukrainian music. In the sensual and ambiguous environment of Hybrid Pleasures, embroidery and weaving are gently distorted and reclaimed, opening new readings of a practice long associated with femininity.

Various Attachments resonates with the shifting realities of wartime Ukraine, where lived experience is continually reshaping inherited ideas of gender, care, and courage.

Maria Kardash is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural scholar from Ukraine (Izmail, Odesa region) currently based in Graz and working on her PhD. Through the exploration of the human body in motion, its potential and its active interaction with space she explores the interconnection between bodily freedom, dance, and politics. As a dance anthropologist, she investigates the topics of othering and belonging, orientalism, eurocentrism, displacement and home, and the role of the dancing body as a political tool.

Maria Chichkova is a musician, music producer, and cultural manager based in Lviv, Ukraine. She is working at the intersection of festival production, niche music programming, and post-war recovery practices.

During a residency at Kunsthaus Graz they developed the performance Various Attachments for the “third space” created by artist Liesl Raff in the exhibition Hybrid Pleasures. Helen Chadwick Supported by Liesl Raff. The residency is part of and co-funded by BRIDGE: Building, Revising, Including – Diaspora and Gender Equality, a European Union Creative Europe Programme.