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Embrace

Interview with the artist Klára Hosnedlová and the curator Anna-Catharina Gebbers

A dynamic and multilayered dialogue with the artist and curator unfolds around the new site-specific installation commissioned by Chanel, on view until October 26. The work reshapes the cold, industrial immensity of the Hamburger Bahnhof’s historic hall into a terrain at once tactile and intimate. Through organic matter, embroidered surfaces, and elusive olfactory traces, it stages a meditation on the intersections of body, memory, and architecture: a shadowed passage through contrasts and scars, where poetic resistance is inscribed within the very fabric of space.

The embrace installation transforms the industrial architecture of the Hamburger Bahnhof into a mythical landscape, where memory, sensation and fragments of history merge into a collective narrative. What was the most intimate, or most difficult , element to translate into physical form?

Klára Hosnedlová : The greatest challenge was to create an atmosphere of intimacy within a space of 2,500 square meters, over 14 meters high, with complex acoustics. The Historic Hall is long, lined with side corridors, and serves as a passage between the museum’s wings. It opens directly onto the reception area with the ticket office, cloakroom, and shop. Like a railway station, it is not only metaphorically a place of transit, it truly functions as one. A helpful way to think about this is through Beatriz Colomina’s essay Sexuality and Space, which argues that architecture is never neutral: it always encodes desire, control, and the body. “Space is not a passive vacuum but an active participant in the production of meaning,” she writes. I relate to this deeply. In my work at Hamburger Bahnhof, I don’t seek to ignore the Historic Hall, nor to neutralise it by adding “decor”; instead, I try to awaken its hidden desires, histories, and absences, by revealing a tactile, mythic and emotional landscape over its stark industrial frame. Through labor-intensive gestures, embroidery, tapestry and organic materials, I bring nature and bodily intimacy into an institutional space, countering its scale and austerity. Within the vast hall, the idea of embrace becomes a place where the public and private collapse into one another where myth and architecture, touch and structure, femininity and monumentality intertwine. By giving physical form to these intangible, emotionally charged registers, I hope the work holds a quiet, destabilising power becoming a radically intimate intervention in a historically male-coded space.

In what ways did the historical and architectural identity of the space align with that of the artist? Was it a synergistic dialogue, or more of a process of negotiation and softening between differing perspectives?

Anna-Catharina G.: There is a spatial, a temporal, and an emotional resonance. Klára Hosnedlová’s exhibitions are always site-specific and draw on the memory inscribed in the architecture and its material aura. By creating an installation with her individual art works she creates environments rather than isolated objects. In doing so, Klára’s exhibitions establish a special atmosphere, often with a reference to the absent and based on gender-specific and material counterpoints. The Historic Hall of Hamburger Bahnhof, once a 19th-century train station and then emblem of industrial architecture, carries a monumental and functional aura—high ceilings, symmetrical grandeur, and an emphasis on spatial order. Klára’s practice, with its intricate attention to craft, surfaces, and memory, taps directly into this kind of architectural legacy. Like in her former exhibitions, Klára here features her hand-embroidered hyper-realistic textile pictures, cast materials, and sculptural furnishings, which feel like archival interventions—echoes rather than contrasts. They reflect on modernist design, idealistic architecture, and bodily absence—much like the building itself, which is at once an art space and a shell of past mobilities and ideologies. Klára’s installations often evoke quiet tension, displacement, and suspended time. These qualities resonate deeply with the Historic Hall’s emptiness and grandeur. Klára neither dominates the space nor disappears into it—instead, her intervention animate its surfaces, tracing the touch of human presence and the erosion of modern ideals. Her world doesn’t overwrite the hall; it inhabits its latent memories. While the hall reflects traditionally masculine-coded industrial architecture, Klára’s practice centers care, craft, and the body, offering a kind of counter-gesture. This isn’t opposition, but re-calibration: her materials—textile, soil, resin, metal—soften, but also interrogate the material ideologies of the space. It’s a quiet resistance, not a rupture. This also fits into the art history of the post-minimalist soft sculptures of Yayoi Kusama or Magdalena Abakanowicz, which can be read in a certain way as a reaction to the more male-dominated Minimal Art. The metal walls that partially close the arches, the concrete slabs on the floor, and the breaking through of the symmetrical architecture framed by iron girders by the amorphous objects spreading out within it could also be interpreted as a humorous, subversive feminist gesture toward these masculine artistic gestures. So, rather than a hard negotiation or contradiction, the relationship between Klára’s work and the Historic Hall at Hamburger Bahnhof can be seen as a form of architectural and conceptual palimpsest—a layering of time, material memory, and artistic gesture. It’s not a blending, but a productive tension, where differences are held rather than erased. This synergy speaks to what the Hamburger Bahnhof increasingly stands for: not only a container of contemporary art, but a thinking space where the past and present encounter each other through texture, silence, and reflection––and sometimes through singing, music and electronic beats: We are proving that atmosphere, gathering, playing, dancing, or any kind of sensuality could also be forms of knowledge production.

“Klára’s work and the Historic Hall at Hamburger Bahnhof can be seen as a form of architectural and conceptual palimpsest—a layering of time, material memory, and artistic gesture.” – Anna-Catharina Gebbers

Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White
Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zden?k Porcal – Studio Flusser
Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zden?k Porcal – Studio Flusser

Do you feel that embrace marks the opening of a new aesthetic and mode of interaction with the exhibition space? Was there a break from previous frameworks, and how has this project influenced your curatorial vision?

Anna-Catharina G. : Klára Hosnedlová’s exhibition has a specific alignment through layered time and material intelligence. embrace challenges and expands curatorial frameworks by pushing us to think and engage more deeply with the affective potential of an exhibition—not just its intellectual or formal parameters.This is part of a broader aesthetic shift. It focuses the curatorial orientation towards slowness, towards texture, towards embodied modes of knowing. We are asked to think of an exhibition less as a format to present artworks and more as a space of shared temporality and resonance—where, in the case of Klára’s exhibition embrace, memory, gendered labour, and architectural history are not just referenced, but made tangible. This approach also redefines public space within the museum not merely as a container or a neutral backdrop, but as a co-author. In embrace, intimacy became a methodology. The hall did not simply host the work—it was activated by it, made porous, tactile, and emotionally present. This sense of care and embodiment was mirrored in the process itself. While we were developing the exhibition, Klára gave birth to a baby boy. During the installation, she made space to give him love, care, and time—while still fully engaged with the production of the show. This is something I deeply respect. It was as mind-shifting for me as her artistic intervention itself—an embodied extension of the exhibition’s values: tenderness, resilience, and presence. Curatorially, this experience has deepened my commitment to site-specificity, care-based practices, and collaborative processes that allow space to be more than infrastructure. This is something I have already practised in previous exhibitions—particularly in the development of group exhibitions that I have curated together with artists and curators from ESEA like Nation, Narration, Narcosis: Collecting Entanglements and Embodied Histories (2022). I hope that this shift with Klára’s exhibition will influence how we work with artists in the future: we ask not only what they bring to the space, but also how we can listen to each other and care for each other as a team—how the artworks and their production can reflect this and transfer it to the space.

In your artistic practice, what role does the political or cultural message play in relation to aesthetic exploration? Which emerges first in your creative process, and how do the two align in your choice of materials and forms?

Klára Hosnedlová : In my solo exhibitions, my embroideries are always embedded in a narration of materials: textiles, resin, cast glass, and surfaces that carry cultural and gendered inscriptions. The materials themselves explore broader themes—memory, absence, labour, domesticity, care—which are inherently political, especially when placed within specific architectural context. I’m not interested in creating overt statements, but rather in the aesthetic re-transcription of impressions or stories that serve as triggers for memory. I believe that touch, craft, and natural/authentic materials activate submerged narratives. From these aesthetic choices, a cultural and political message may emerge—one I neither seek to translate nor to control. These choices are instinctive, sometimes subconscious, and may speak for themselves when transposed into a public space.In that sense, the political enters through the way I choose to work: through slowness, through attention to detail, through the role of the body. For example, embroidery is not only a medium but also a form of slow resistance, historically gendered, and often excluded from the language of monumentality. This is where the aesthetic experience becomes symbol, an unexpected vehicle for reflection—not as something ornamental, but as a form of embodied knowledge.

The installation seems to oscillate between a desire for protection and an exposure to vulnerability. How does this dualism reflect your personal experience? And what does the act of self-experiencing your own work give back to you, as an artist?

Klára Hosnedlová : I think embrace holds both gestures—protection and exposure—as those states often coexist in real life and even complement each other. This exhibition is in fact not about dualism but about porosity: how our physical and emotional boundaries are often porous, how they expand and influence other people, other generations. There’s a tenderness in that porosity, but also an incredible strength.

“Embrace is definitely an open threshold—an invitation to feel, rather than to decode.” – Klára Hosnedlová

Do you prefer to propose a historically and contextually grounded reading of the work, or would you rather leave room for open interpretation? Is embrace a complete narrative, or more of an open threshold?

Klára Hosnedlová: For me, embrace is definitely an open threshold, an invitation to feel, rather than to decode. While the work draws on historical and architectural contexts, I prefer to leave space for personal projection and sensory interpretation. The viewer’s presence completes the work.

Anna-Catharina Gebbers: I see embrace as a layered proposition—rooted in site-specific histories and material references to cultural histories from the region where Klára was born, but deliberately kept open to give space for visitors’ associations, experiences, and feelings. It doesn’t prescribe meaning like a linear narration, it’s rather a non-linear narration with several entry points; it creates conditions for resonance and personal emotions. We aimed to hold space for intimacy, ambiguity, and multiple readings, rather than a fixed narrative.

You have often described your art as a “living membrane.” Which aspects of embrace represent a turning point or a departure from your previous work?

Klára Hosnedlová: In embrace, the idea of a “living membrane” still exists. The main difference from earlier projects was, apart from the obvious change in scale, the implementation of a sound piece, adding another layer to the sensorial landscape. It was created in collaboration with Billy Bultheel and features folkloric songs interpreted by the women’s choir Lada, the voice of rapper Yzomandias, and instrumental sounds such as church bells. Sound is another immersive element that I definitely would like to use more often in future projects.

What were the main challenges you encountered during the realisation of the project? Were there constraints and limitations, or did the space naturally open up to the artistic vision?

Anna-Catharina G.: The main challenge in the Historic Hall is always its scale and complexity—its vastness, acoustics, and function as a transit space within the museum. It’s a place with a strong architectural authority and institutional weight. But rather than treating these as constraints, Klára responded to them with precision and care. The installation didn’t fight the space; it listened to it. Through layered materials, sound, and atmosphere, embrace slowly transformed the hall from a site of passage into a space of resonance. I feel fortunate to have been able to support her in feeling into the space and discussing the composition throughout the two years we worked together on this exhibition. It was a privilege to visit her and experience the surroundings of her hometown, which deeply influence her sensibility and artistic language. This closeness—between artist, space, and process—shaped embrace at every level.

The installation can be read as a form of utopian architecture. Do you think this kind of experimentation could be translated into everyday living spaces? What role does the environment play in shaping identity both personal and collective?

Klára Hosnedlová: I’m not very fond of the terms utopian or dystopian to describe my installations, as I see them more as reflections of something nuanced and real. That said, I understand why these words are often used. My work is deeply inspired by emotions and, as such, invites interpretation through specific intentions. However, for embrace as with all my projects, I tend to think of my installations as forms of speculative architecture, ones that gently blur the boundaries between body and space, public and private. Our environments shape us profoundly and persistently, but we also change them, sometimes drastically, influenced by political regimes, ecological crises, and more. My work focuses specifically on this duality, exploring alternative scenarios and possibilities that resonate with various architectural experiments, even if they are not direct inspirations.

Anna-Catharina Gebbers: Yes, embrace gestures toward a form of speculative architecture, one that is responsive, emotionally charged, and materially intelligent. It opens the question of how spaces could be designed not just for efficiency or aesthetics, but for sensing, remembering, and caring. I do believe aspects of this thinking can and should enter our everyday environments. The spaces we inhabit shape both personal and collective identity, often in unconscious ways. By experimenting within an institutional space like Hamburger Bahnhof, we can ask broader questions: How do we want to live? What do we want our surroundings to reflect back to us?

What did you aim to assert in the contemporary art scene through this project? Which key elements did you choose to emphasise, and what do you hope might be developed further in the future?

Anna-Catharina Gebbers: This exhibition addresses care, collaboration and sensitivity – both for the space and for lived experiences. One of the most important aspects for me was the emotional atmosphere that embrace creates – not through deliberate manipulation, but through material and spatial resonance. Drawing on Eva Illouz, who argues that emotions are not purely individual but shaped by our socialisation, upbringing, and cultural context, the installation can be seen as a call for respect for emotional diversity. We all relate differently because we’ve been formed differently. embrace invites respect for that multiplicity. I hope that I here can continue to support artistic practices that create space for complexity, intellectual AND emotional reflection, and forms of resistance within institutional contexts.

Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zden?k Porcal – Studio Flusser
Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zden?k Porcal – Studio Flusser
Klára Hosnedlová, CHANEL Commission: Klára Hosnedlová. embrace, 2025, Installationsansicht Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 1.5. – 26.10.2025 © Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zden?k Porcal – Studio Flusser
Klára Hosnedlová by Vitali Gelwich

Embrace / Klára Hosnedlová & Anna-Catharina Gebbers

Credits

Artist: Klára Hosnedlová /  @klarahosnedlova
Curator : Anna-Catharina Gebbers / @bibliothekswohnung
Venue: Hamburger Bahnhof / @hamburger_bahnhof
Commissioned by: Chanel / @chanelofficial
Interview: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko

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