At Hamburger Bahnhof’s soaring historic hall in Berlin, Klára Hosnedlová’s 'embrace' unfurls like a deeply coded dreamscape—an ambitious, site-specific commission that fuses memory, materiality, and monumentality.
Part of the inaugural CHANEL Commission, this is not just Hosnedlová’s most expansive institutional project to date, but a generational declaration in scale and intent. Within 2,500 square meters of industrial space once meant for trains and now reimagined for radical imagination, the Czech-born artist creates a suspended ecology of flax tapestries, fossil-like sculptures, and iron-clad nostalgia. The result is a post-industrial sanctuary where textile softens steel, and private history is braided into public space.
Hosnedlová’s vision is firmly anchored in the tensions of her homeland. Growing up in Moravia—where brutalist architecture and Slavic folklore stand in an uneasy détente—she draws from the visual language of shifting borders and the ghostly remnants of ideological regimes. Concrete slabs etched with resin evoke both factory floors and ceremonial altars. Suspended tapestries act as both curtains and cartographies, their motifs drawn from the artist’s own filmed performances. These domestic yet surreal vignettes are embroidered into the material, resulting in objects that oscillate between memory, myth, and meditative archive.
What distinguishes embrace is not merely its scale, but its quiet, cinematic poise. The installation invites you not to observe but to inhabit—a tactile landscape rich in scent, sound, and rhythm. The air smells of hemp and earth. A sonic palette mingles Czech rap with the polyphonic voices of a Carpathian choir, echoing through the vaulted space like a memory trying to take shape. This is not spectacle for its own sake, but a complex invocation of place—rural, female, and politically freighted. Here, past and present embrace each other like long-lost kin.
Hosnedlová’s refusal to see her work as finished grants embrace a vital permeability. It is not a monument but a membrane—absorbing, responding, evolving. Each embroidery is a scene from an unfinished film; each cast sculpture, a skin shed by an imagined future. In a cultural moment marked by fracture and dislocation, this installation offers a form of tender resistance, a call to remember the porous boundaries between personal and political, craft and concept, fragility and force.
