by Johanna Siegler // May 20, 2025
Steel trusses and girders span the length of the former train station that makes up the vaulted central hall of Hamburger Bahnhof. They support a glazed roof that filters daylight in calibrated bands across the pale stone floor. The artist’s largest institutional solo exhibition to date, Klára Hosnedlová’s ‘embrace’ builds upon that industrial heritage, elevating the space into a mythic terrain spun out of raw materials into a landscape of eerie grandeur. A blue butterfly, its wings bruised and tattered, rests on a reflective puddle at the show’s entrance. The ground smells of fragrant earth: damp, aromatic and almost cloyingly alive. Giant hand-woven tapestries of flax and hemp, some nine meters tall, hang from the trusses. They drape like animal hides as they pendulate above a sea of hard-edged squares. The walls are overlaid with welded iron plates and fossil-like, sand-coated reliefs. Despite the overwhelming vastness of the space, it is a thoroughly orchestrated environment in which monumental scale is persistently offset by fragile, tactile details that draw the visitor into close, attentive looking.
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace,’ 2025, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2025 // © courtesy of the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser
Hosnedlová’s installation insists on touch and smell almost as much as sight. Visitors move across the concrete slabs with a kind of enforced rhythm, the grid echoing the austere, standardized paving of Hosnedlová’s Moravian youth as an echo of the modular urban design typical of socialist-era public spaces. In places, the ground opens up and is filled with dark earth and muddy puddles, breaking the regularity of the flooring. Those glossy resin pools mirror the steel rafters and tactile tapestries above, as though their reflections have been fused into the epoxy. The flax and hemp that interlace within the large-scale tapestries, plants once widely cultivated in Bohemia and Moravia, have been hand-spun, dyed in muted ochres, browns and red and felted into enormous, hanging volumes. Every surface registers a different sensation. Some soft with warmth, others cold, industrial and unyielding, they envelop the visitor in the full sensory grain of the past.
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace,’ 2025, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2025 // © courtesy of the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser
Meanwhile, the soundscape deepens this impression. From four hulking speaker stacks, salvaged Turbosound towers from Berlin’s club scene, one hears tolling church bells and melodies from woodwinds and lower-pitched brass instruments. Over this rolls a women’s choir singing in Moravian dialects and faintly, verses by Czech rapper Yzomandias. Occasionally, wolfish howls and pants rise, echoing off the ribs of the roof. The auditory space feels alive, as if the sculptures and fibers act as conduits, absorbing sonic vibrations and releasing them back into the room. Combined with the earthy smells, these sounds make the environment feel lived-in. The result is a constant oscillation between pockets of sheltered warmth and some latent agitation that is hard to grasp.
Reflective nostalgia, cultural theorist Svetlana Boym writes, is “a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play.” Hosnedlová’s is such a labor: her handmade techniques, the interlacing of childhood, political history and sensory fragments, perform nostalgia as personal excavation, and at times as the quiet continuation of a fiction threaded forward. “What matters,” Boym writes, “is not the actual return home,” but a “rendezvous with oneself.” Throughout ‘embrace,’ that self appears contested, distorted by the industrial mirror-pools and woven into the realm of distending fabrics.
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace,’ 2025, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2025 // © courtesy of the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser
The thread carries through materially. Hosnedlová’s wall-mounted reliefs take on an almost anatomical, exoskeletal structure, unfolding in agitated, unsettled contours that seem to pulse outward. Their coarse, sand-coated surfaces are pierced by insets and translucent, claw-like glass forms, intensifying the impression of latent violence or containment. Shards of pale glass jut out from these casts in rib-like formations, their surfaces recalling sea glass or fossilized amber washed ashore by the Baltic’s cold tide, rendered in willfully soft, almost tender hues. Embedded within their recesses are hyperrealist embroideries that function as narrative vignettes. It is as if something has surfaced. A repressed memory, maybe too painful or complex to confront directly, partially flickering through the rough material in symbolically charged images.
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace,’ 2025, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2025 // © courtesy of the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser
Indeed, the show’s most intimate narratives are woven in thread. The tiny embroidered scenes, often set in sculptural alcoves, feel like private relics in the rubble. One shows a flashlight beam illuminating Black skin; another depicts pigment gently smeared across the curve of a back, or perhaps the spine of an animal. Each small tableau appears devoted to an act of remembrance and care. As the museum notes, the motifs come from video recordings of Hosnedlová’s own performances, bridging personal myth and the inherited tradition of embroidery in a reflection on home, heritage and, perhaps, the sliver of utopia found within. It is here that Svetlana Boym’s observation feels uncannily apt: “While futuristic utopias might be out of fashion, nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes it is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways.” These embroidered fragments seem to exist precisely in that lateral temporality. The motif of touch becomes a catalyst for a multiform remembrance: by detailing hands that smear pigment on the skin of another or hold a flame close to one’s own, the works conjure the affective, felt “ghost” of memory itself. By situating some of these threaded reliefs into the fiber sculptures, the artist literally threads the body into the politically charged material that was once grown and woven in the contested, rural borderland of today’s Czech Republic, opening another dimension of intergenerational, somatic remembering.
There is another delicate motif woven through these grand forms: the butterfly (or moth), that appears as fragile, wounded and almost otherworldly. At the entrance, a single torn blue wing lies in a resin puddle; elsewhere, embroidered insects appear in hidden niches. In one shallow recess, an embroidered butterfly is caught with tweezers and held in a human hand, its pale yellow wing lightly singed by fire. These insects, rendered in iridescent cobalt blue and sepia, appear as endangered messengers of vulnerability and change. In these moments, the theme is explicit: as symbols of metamorphosis and fragility, the butterflies gesture not only toward loss, but also toward the flickering, lively possibility of play and transformation.
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace,’ 2025, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2025 // © courtesy of the artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser
While the work poignantly stages the tension between intimacy, hope and decay in an exploration of “belonging” and nostalgia, its immersive beauty, soft hues and carefully weathered textures sometimes risk aestheticizing the very conditions it seeks to remember. Yet, perhaps this is not a failure of confrontation, but, in the spirit of what Boym terms “reflective nostalgia,” a conscious embrace of memory’s ambiguity. Rather than seeking to restore a lost home, it dwells in the gaps, contradictions and textures of the past, allowing them to remain unresolved. Drawing on the material legacies of socialist Moravia and Cold War architecture, the installation gestures toward histories of control, division and erasure, yet it does so through poetics that invite the viewer in. Rather than obscuring, the softness at work here enacts the typical “sideways” of nostalgia that reckons through atmosphere, through care and through the slow, textural work of re-weaving memory into a nearly-habitable, material history.
Exhibition Info
Hamburger Bahnhof
‘CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová embrace’
Exhibition: May 1-Oct. 26, 2025
Admission: € 16 (reduced € 8)
smb.museum
Invalidenstraße 50, 10557 Berlin, click here for map
