Costumes: Anna Heim, Performers: Ruth Ikondo, Denis Emmenegger, Matilde Simões]

For her first institutional solo exhibition, Klára Hosnedlová metamorphoses the Kestner Gesellschaft’s halls into labyrinthian interiorities, laboriously modelling spatialities of voyeuristic surfaces—oblique mirrors of humanoid selves. Her monumental performative sculptures, suspended like clouds of opaque matter, are incubators of corporeal poetry, generous habitats for miniature images of a fragmented, post-industrial world at the brink of exhaustion.

Situating her hybrid practice at the multiconfluence of craft, fashion, design, architecture, sculpture and performance, Hosnedlová choreographs complex, immersive environments of a striking cinematic and theatrical quality that recall subterranean time capsules, planted for undefined moments of the future. Inspired by modern and brutalist architecture of Central-Eastern Europe and folkloric Bohemian textile traditions, Hosnedlová’s is a mental spectacle of a cultural immersion and a remastered investigation of the patterns of belonging.

Getting under the skin of a pictorial field, the artist performs a mirage of a painterly image: narrative gestures of a stitching process, elaborated with care and precision of a surgeon and a storyteller, trick the perception and deceive the senses, generating a suspense of disbelief. Meticulously layered silk threads on a smooth surface of a canvas resemble the subtle movements of brush strokes, producing a dense texture of a unique, estranged nature, a zone of fragility with almost relief-like visual effect.

The environments Hosnedlová creates are saturated with an almost haptic pastness of an unbearable nostalgia, but at the same time, they resonate with a force of an ancestral nature towards a future post-aect body yet to be reconceived; a scenography of a new life to be born—a sound of hatching, a pulsation of the vein, a ceremony of becoming a glitch—an antibody, resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural architecture.

Hosnedlová’s work is a shamanistic rite of renewal and redemption, an al-chemic tale on a surgical table of a phantasmagoric cocoon, an emballage of a dream. We are in a realm of initiation: a possible and necessary, new genesis of the post-human and post-nature.

Born in 1990 in Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic, KLÁRA HOSNEDLOVÁ attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (2009 – 2016) and is currently pursuing her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. She lives and works in Berlin. Her works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions at venues including X Museum, Beijing (2022); Parcours, Art Basel (2021); Meyer Kainer, Vienna (2021); the Baltic Triennial 14, Vilnius (2021); the 54th October Salon, Belgrade Biennale (2021); the 7th Athens Biennale (2021); Kraupa- Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2020); Berghain, Berlin (2020); Fondation Cartier, Paris (2019); the National Theater, Prague (2018); Villa Tugendhat, Brno (2017); hunt kastner, Prague (2016); and the National Gallery, Prague (2015). She is currently participating in the 16th Lyon Biennale (2022).

[Text: Kestner Gesellschaft]

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