From May 1 to October 26, 2025, Czech-born artist Klara Hosnedlova takes over the vast main hall of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof with her most ambitious installation to date. Titled embrace, the project is the latest edition of the prestigious CHANEL Commission, which annually invites one artist to create a site-specific work at the Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. Hosnedlová’s intervention explores the idea of utopia and the domestic through the lens of cultural memory and post-border landscapes, reflecting on the social and material legacies of Central Europe.
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At the core of embrace are monumental tapestries, some reaching nine meters in height, embroidered with imagery drawn from Hosnedlová’s performative work in Berlin. These visual fragments, originally captured on film, are stitched into vast flax-based works, creating a kind of spatial storytelling that combines private gesture with collective memory. Alongside these are sculptural reliefs, cast glass objects, iron walls, and concrete elements that echo the architectural language of postwar and communist-era Eastern Europe. The materials, heavy with symbolism, reference artisanal traditions and industrial residues found in the Czech-German borderlands.
The installation marks a shift in scale and ambition for Hosnedlová, who is known for her intimate embroideries and labor-intensive processes. At Hamburger Bahnhof, she builds a fully immersive environment within the industrial shell of the museum’s historic hall. The result is a terrain where the domestic collides with the monumental, home becomes both shelter and stage, with each object charged by history. “embrace” positions itself as a meditation on belonging, spatial identity, and the tensions between fragility and endurance in physical and political structures.
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For the CHANEL Commission, Hosnedlová’s contribution is particularly significant. The program, launched to empower contemporary artists with the resources and freedom to rethink the possibilities of institutional space, now reaches a new benchmark in scale and narrative complexity. Spanning 2,500 square meters, the historic hall is transformed into a multilayered arena where sculpture, architecture, and textile work are in constant dialogue.
The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, whose curatorial vision supports Hosnedlová’s engagement with space and memory. Their approach allows the artist’s sculptural language to expand beyond its typical scale, engaging with architecture as both subject and medium. The exhibition is accompanied by the eleventh volume in Hamburger Bahnhof’s catalogue series, published by Silvana Editoriale Milano and available in museum bookstores and online.
Through material, history, and quiet radicality, Hosnedlová’s installation invites visitors to reflect on what it means to construct home in the ruins and remainders of political change.
