KLÁRA HOSNEDLOVÁ | TO INFINITY
Project title: Klára Hosnedlová – Sakura Silk Moth (Art Basel Parcours)
Location: Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany
Year: 2021
Courtesy the artist: Klára Hosnedlová, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin & White Cube, London
Curators: Adam Budak, Alexander Wilmschen
Photo: Zdeněk Porcal
For her first institutional solo exhibition, Klára Hosnedlová metamorphoses the Kestner Gesellschaft’s halls into labyrinthian interiorities, laboriously modeling 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 futurity. 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-affect 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.