From the ceiling hang gigantic hair-like forms, trailing across the floor due to their length. As I approach them, I step on light gray asphalt tiles. In summer those tiles are usually blazing hot. At Hamburger Bahnhof the tiles are cold. Every few meters the floor splits, and instead of more tiles lie silent pools of sand and congealed thick black liquid. On each such island, loudspeakers are piled up, from which emanates women’s singing or a faint whispering. Between the arches of the old station hang hybrid creatures, giant fossils with large claws. From each fossil peeks out embroidery; human hands painting on a back with mud, other hands setting a butterfly on fire, naked bodies, more hands.
In her exhibition Embrace, Karla Hosnedlová (b. 1990) creates a sacred space, a mélange of past-present-future, of handicraft and ancient rituals alongside human gestures devoid of explanation. This is the largest solo exhibition to date of the young artist, born in the territory today considered the Czech Republic. Hosnedlová, who lives and works in Berlin, was born in Moravia during the post-communist period in the Czech Republic. In her work she is influenced by the 60s and 70s (of the 20th century) brutalist and modernist architecture of Eastern Europe. Inspired by the visuality of architectural models, she engages with collective memory, gender, home, history, and mythology.
The space crosses boundaries and fuses past and future, through craftwork such as the massive forms hanging from the ceiling, made of hand-worked linen and canvas, or Hosnedlová’s hyper realistic embroidery images. The loudspeakers once stood in various clubs across Berlin. They are dusty. I look at them and picture in my mind raves at dawn in the early 1990s. The painting-like embroideries peeking out of the giant fossils are based on performances meant for the artist’s eyes only, staged by Hosnedlová in her studio. She documents them. Later, the images become embroideries embedded in strange bodies, sculptures resembling salt crystals or fossils. They are fragmentary, representing a shard of a larger tale, leaving the viewer struggling to know more.
The iron structure of the old station (originally built in 1846 to connect Berlin to Hamburg) transforms into a delicate forest where the viewer can retreat among the monumental fabrics. From each corner the sound emerges intermittently. Walking through the space brings the viewer to un-identified past, while at the same time hinting at something impending, nearly arriving, disastrous, impossible to pin down. Everything is on the verge of collapse, destined to go up in flames. In Hosnedlová’s images she chooses to embroider butterflies, insects whose life span is brief, or pyromaniac rituals in the moment before ignition. Youth; The moment before ignition – the in-between, like the butterfly, like sleepless nights in clubs, radical innocence and courage, that deep knowing that anything is possible. The combination of the loudspeakers and tiles that echo the 1990s, with the natural materials, the sand, the fabrics, the giant fossils and the women’s chanting in the background – generates incoherence about the present moment, leaving the viewer trapped in an unclear dimension of time. Youth.
Hosnedlová and the curatorial team managed to create a space that exists as spectacle, and therefore one must be particularly cautious in approaching the reading of her work. Do the senses, the neck craning upward under the height of the installation, the tears welling at the corners of the eyes to the sound of the women’s chant, the body pausing at the sight of wild hybrid creatures that seem to exist from the dawn of existence – do all these suffice to articulate the experience and grasp its essence?
It is always the body. Those sensations are often impossible to put in words, and that is perhaps a writer’s hardest mission. Hosnedlova’s exhibition engages with the body, at least it did for mine. And perhaps exhibitions like these are the very best ones.
Exhibition: CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace
Curated by Sam Bardaouil & Anna-Catharina Gebbers
Exhibition duration: 01.05.2025 to 26.10.2025
Venue: Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Klára Hosnedlová – www.instagram.com/klarahosnedlova/
Gal Houbara Bergman – www.gal-hb.com, www.instagram.com/gal_hb/
