Step into the belly of Berlin’s most storied train station and you won’t find locomotives or luggage. Instead, you’ll encounter flax, iron, glass, and a haunting echo of Central Europe’s fractured histories. embrace, the first CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof, is not an exhibition. It is an environment—at once brutal and tender, stoic and softly bleeding.

The Czech-born, Berlin-based Klára Hosnedlová has filled the museum’s 2,500-square-meter historic hall with towering nine-meter tapestries, cast-glass forms, and slabs of clay and concrete that appear to have been wrestled from both a future utopia and a past regime. It is her most monumental work to date, and a staggering declaration of what contemporary sculpture, textile, and memory can do when they cohabit the same charged space.

The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil, Director of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Curator of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

Stitching a Borderland

If sculpture is usually about space, then Hosnedlová adds time, and a very specific kind: the time of borderlands. The motifs in her embroideries—hand-stitched yet vast—are drawn from film stills and performances she staged in Berlin. But they carry the scent of older ghosts. The work references the architecture, literature, and cinema of the Czech border regions—places where history never stopped arguing with itself.

Some visitors might feel as though they’ve stepped into a piece of nature that has mysteriously made its way into the museum

says Klára Hosnedlová

During Berlin Gallery Weekend, art takes center stage — not only in the city’s galleries but also in its major museums. Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová brings a sense of monumental tenderness to the Hamburger Bahnhof.

The CHANEL Commission: Fashioning the Future of Museums

That this bold installation inaugurates the CHANEL Commission speaks volumes. The partnership between the CHANEL Culture Fund and Hamburger Bahnhof isn’t some glossy marriage of luxury and legacy. It is a gesture of institutional ambition, a provocation. It transforms the notion of a commission from decorative afterthought to conceptual fulcrum.

Under the stewardship of Sam Bardaouil and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Hamburger Bahnhof has bet on scale—not for spectacle’s sake, but to offer artists the space and resources they need to think in topographies. And Hosnedlová, born in 1990, is thinking in geographies, politics, materials, and myths.

Her concrete slabs echo communist architecture, yet they do not flatten into nostalgia or critique. They hold the ideological and artisanal in suspension. They belong to no one system and all systems at once. They are, like utopia itself, perpetually postponed and perpetually yearned for.

When you are here, you are not sure if you are really in the past, present or future

The Czech artist spoke to the Financial Times about ‘embrace’, remarking on its ambiguity

The exhibition is curated by Sam Bardaouil, Director of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart and Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Curator of Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.

A Portrait of the Museum as a Platform

There is something radical about giving over this much space—and trust—to one young artist. But that’s the wager of the CHANEL Commission: not to showcase, but to surrender. Hamburger Bahnhof becomes a collaborator, not a container. The installation becomes not a monument, but a membrane—porous with memory, rigorous in form.

Hosnedlová doesn’t simply “explore themes” of home, utopia, and ideology. She builds them. In clay and glass and light. She makes them breathable, touchable, and difficult. She embroideries the liminal. And in doing so, she asserts herself as one of the most powerful sculptural voices of her generation.