Berlin
“embrace,” Klára Hosnedlová’s largest exhibition to date and the Hamburger Bahnhof’s inaugural Chanel Commission (through January 4, 2026), transforms the museum’s iconic central hall into an almost unimaginable sculptural environment. Originally built as a train station (1846–47), the building, with its structural framing of iron girders rising into elegant arches, was intended to showcase German engineering prowess. Hosnedlová’s immersive intervention interacts with the architecture directly; poised for visitors to explore a shared human experience, it is at once ancient and futuristic, a glimpse of past wildernesses, perhaps, or the imagined barren wastelands of speculative futures.
Hosnedlová, a Czech artist who lives and works in Berlin, invites us to enter into and experience a rich fictional landscape that draws on places, themes, and subjects as wide-ranging as the historic regions of Bohemia and Moravia (now the border area between the Czech Republic and Slovakia), the public fountains of Berlin, and the city’s techno club culture. The scope and vision of “embrace” is considerable—not only conceptually, but also visually. Yana Peel, writing in the extensive exhibition catalogue, suggests that the invitation is to enter a utopian landscape, but dystopian feels truer to Hosnedlová’s imaginative stance—we seem to witness a failed ideology.
Her site-specific spatial composition is dominated by a collection of massive hanging tapestries, some reaching nine meters in height. Made of coarsely woven flax and hemp, and colored with vegetable dyes in shades of blue-gray and reddish-brown, these shaggy, biomorphic forms fill the space with an overwhelming, almost alien presence. Textured surfaces and embedded cast-glass elements draw us in, as we struggle to make sense of the enormity and presence of these performatively produced sculptures.
There are elements of the familiar and unfamiliar throughout “embrace.” As with the flax in the tapestries, the materials used in other elements of the installation—glass, sandstone, clay, iron, and concrete—may be known, but they are used in less obvious ways. Concrete paving slabs cover the floor, which may gesture to their ubiquity in urban modernization, but uniform monotony is disrupted by open areas streaked with puddles of epoxy resin and earth. Almost subterranean, these rough and raw passages might point to Hosnedlová’s childhood homeland. Between the hanging tapestries, which carve out “rooms” within the larger space, banks of speakers recycled from Berlin clubs broadcast a sound composition that includes the Lada women’s choir.
Seven cast-glass sculptures covered in a coating of stone and mineral dust are scattered throughout the space, some affixed to the surrounding walls and others nestled into the tapestries. While their fossil-like appearance alludes to Moravia’s prehistoric past beneath the sea (the artist collected fossils as a child), the monumental scale of the wall-hung works also recalls the communist-era friezes seen in state buildings throughout Eastern Europe. Like fossils, these sculptures act as a kind of time capsule; embroidered panels held within the matrix of stone and glass preserve imagery derived from filmed performances staged by Hosnedlová. These performances, in turn, were inspired by classic Czech novels and films such as Marketa Lazarová and The Valley of the Bees, which adds additional, allusive layers of historical depth.
Hosnedlová explains that the exhibition title describes a particular gesture. Whether that gesture of embrace—of a body or an ideology—is seen as an invitation or an invasion, performed willingly or under duress, depends on the circumstances. Here, immersed deep within Hosnedlová’s sculptural imagination, and despite the dystopian undertones, the environment feels safe enough, and choice still operative.
