The Brooklyn Rail

The historic resonance of Klára Hosnedlová’s installation at Hamburger Bahnhof stems not only from its setting—the museum’s grand central hall, reminiscent of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall—but also from the nature of the collaboration that enabled its creation. Hosnedlová’s most ambitious work to date, embrace, spans the vast 2,500-square-meter industrial space and marks the beginning of a three-year partnership between the public museum and the fashion house Chanel through its Culture Fund.

Formerly a nineteenth-century train station, the hall has been transformed into a space that evokes the atmosphere of a shadowy theatrical set—perhaps one designed for a postmodern play. Towering tapestries, some reaching up to nine meters, loom hauntingly over the grand room. What distinguishes the installation from a theatrical presentation is the nearness of the viewers. Hosnedlová invites you to step into her multisensory immersive environment, to touch the deceptively delicate flax and hemp fibres of the tapestries, to follow mysterious sounds with no clear source, to lean towards the work and search for an olfactory element that is not there. By selectively removing floor tiles in seemingly arbitrary patterns, revealing patches of wet or oil-slicked earth beneath, Hosnedlová subtly choreographs the viewer’s movement through the installation.

The black steel ribs that support the arched roof of the white hall exist in perfect symbiosis with the large, woven, irregular forms rendered in a brown-toned palette. Together, they create a scenography that feels primordial—even prehistoric—as the massive lumps of wool conjure the image of skinned mammoths. And yet, as Hosnedlová explains, the eerie, imposing environment she builds through a highly labor-intensive process is not an interpretation of a dystopian, postapocalyptic future. Her work is less concerned with speculative futures than it is rooted in the past, both in her personal memory and the legacy of modernism, particularly in architecture.

How, then, do we connect these monumental textile forms to the twentieth-century movement of modernism, which famously called for severing ties with the past? And how do they relate to her own memory?

Upon further consideration, Hosnedlová’s work engages with modernist principles in multiple ways. Most fundamentally, her choice of materials that complement embroidery—cast glass, iron, and concrete slabs—resonates with the material language of modernism. These choices recall the prescriptions of Antonio Sant’Elia, a prominent Futurist, who argued that architecture should embrace its utilitarian essence, and that new technologies were worthy of aesthetic consideration. “Glass, concrete, and iron,”¹ he declared, are “rich in the inherent beauty of their lines and modelling,” ² a truth embodied by Hosnedlová’s work.

Similarly, the artist adopts embroidery as her primary medium of expression. Echoing the Bauhaus manifesto’s call to “Create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist,”³ she elevates embroidery from its historically marginal status as a craft. A medium long gendered and associated with domestic labor—particularly in Eastern European contexts where Hosnedlová is from and where it often appeared in folkloric and decorative forms—embroidery here is repurposed with conceptual and sculptural ambition. In this, Hosnedlová follows in the lineage of Eastern European artists such as Magdalena Abakanowicz, who gained international recognition for her “Abakans”: large woven forms suspended from ceilings. Yet, unlike Hosnedlová, Abakanowicz worked within the constraints of a Polish Communist bloc, which limited the scale and resources available to her, resulting in works of comparatively modest dimensions.

Hosnedlová guides the viewer from the macro scale of her monumental tapestries to the micro level of detail embedded within them. Among the intricate knots revealed are hyperrealist embroidered images—meticulously crafted scenes based on digital photographs of performances staged within the installation environment before its public unveiling. Hosnedlová approaches the site as “a canvas” on which she adds layers of metaphoric paint, in her case “sculptures, scenography elements, performance and costumes.” Through images of past performances, she engages in a form of self-regeneration, weaving together past and present to create a continuous narrative.

These performative interventions, later removed from the site, leave traces behind. The gesture of extracting the performers after they have inhabited the space can be an allusion to broader themes of migration, shifting borders, and shared memory. It gestures towards the ephemeral presence of bodies, recorded and remembered through images, and resonates with stories of change and displacement familiar to the artist’s context. Born in the Czech Republic, a former Soviet satellite state, just a year before the collapse of the USSR, Hosnedlová’s work is attuned to historical rupture and personal geography.

The weight of the tapestry, literal and symbolic, thus becomes a kind of protective skin: a warm embrace and a sanctuary from sociopolitical fracture. At the same time, the work reverberates with the ideals of modernist figures such as Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, who advocated for a union between technology and aesthetics. In Hosnedlová’s hands, this union is reimaged through a feminist and materially embodied lens, as it combines craft, architectural planning, and memory.

This show is a product of an unprecedented model of collaboration within the German cultural landscape—namely, a partnership between the public and private sectors. Public cultural institutions are increasingly challenged in securing stable funding for both programming and operations. Amid ongoing reductions in state support, heightened scrutiny over funding sources, and a political climate that increasingly redirects public resources towards sectors deemed more urgent—particularly with Germany recently committing a historic sum to military spending for the first time since WWII—museums have been pushed toward market-oriented solutions. As a result, they are compelled to explore alternative business models and forge strategic alliances to sustain their activities and relevance. This show is a manifestation of that shift.

Whilst such initiatives are often celebrated as innovative—bringing together the intelligence and resources of both sectors to achieve what would otherwise be impossible—they are not without controversy. These partnerships have drawn criticism amid an ongoing ethical debate about the privatization of public cultural spaces, which are meant to serve the interest of the community, not private corporations.

Against this backdrop, the directors of Hamburger Bahnhof, Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, recognize the sensitivity of such collaborations. They affirm that “the role of a public institution is to serve—not to sell” and recognise that Germany’s museum arena has rightfully remained cautious in this area. However, they also argue that the belief that “public service and private support are mutually exclusive is outdated.” For Bardaouil and Fellrath, preserving institutional autonomy is possible through “mindful governance and transparency,” noting that partnerships are evaluated against standards that are “not just financial, but intellectual, artistic and civic.” In this light, Hamburger Bahnhof positions itself as a supporter of this evolving standard—one that facilitates the commissioning of ambitious work, supports artists in a meaningful manner, and allows it to reach new, otherwise inaccessible audiences.

On the other side of the partnership, Yana Peel, Global Head of Arts and Culture at Chanel, underscores the commitment to ethical private support, emphasising the company’s efforts toward “being a sustainable partner as a private company.” Drawing on her experience as a former CEO of Serpentine Galleries, based in London, Peel advocates for “long-term partnerships that enable cultural leaders and artists to get the time and space” they need for meaningful growth. In doing so, the Chanel Culture Fund continues the legacy of Coco Chanel, herself a devoted patron of avant-garde contemporaries such as Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky.

As Bardaouil and Fellrath conclude, their collaboration with the fashion house is “a reimagination of what public space can be in our time.” The key, they assert, lies in “preserving the integrity of the curatorial voice while opening the door for private cultural philanthropy to play a more visionary role in public institutions.” Thus, Hosnedlová’s embrace, in addition to being a powerful installation, represents a broader cultural shift in Germany and the redefinition of traditional boundaries and relationships between stakeholders in the art world.