Klára Hosnedlová / NEST

K – T – Z, Berlin

7 November 2020 – 16 January 2021

by Elda Oreto

In Liberec, not far from the border between Germany and the Czech Republic, a building stands out like a mushroom hat in the desert: the Ještěd Tower, a telecommunications antenna built during the Soviet regime. This place, once a measure of technological progress, represented a model of future life of balance between life and work and connection between each other through advanced communication technologies.

In fact, inside this building in the shape of an inverted funnel, there were also recreational activities and even a hotel; a bit like in the spaceship in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. While pursuing an ideal, the Ještěd Tower has become the emblem of how things unfortunately went differently.

In her first solo show in Germany, N E S T, at the K-T-Z, Klára Hosnedlová, born in 1990, who lives and works in Berlin, explores the feeling of nostalgia and failure materialized in a place like the Ještěd Tower, emblematic space of postmodern architecture and contemporary design.

In the exhibition curated by Sarah Johanna Theurer, the artist intervenes on the exhibition space by modifying it through the creation of a series of sculptures that reflect some of the aesthetic and formal motifs of the tower.

In the center of the exhibition space, a huge lamp made with a series of glass tubes from floor to ceiling is turning on and off as if it was broken or it could not function properly. It struggles, but it can’t work.

Next to the lamp there is a table-shaped sculpture made of stone and metal. At the center of the table, on the surface, there is a false bottom, as in a modernist style minibar; inside it, instead of liquors, there are rocks on which have grown mushrooms, originally from the Liberec area. Next to the large brown mushrooms huge butterflies are blending in; during the night they can fly around the exhibition space. On the floor there are plexiglass plates that mimic the shape of water. Next to the table there is an uncomfortable seat, made of stone and steel.

Two Large gray panels with a gray frame are installed on the walls; made of fused glass and some small embroidery on canvas. The embroideries are a frequent motif in the artistic practice of Hosnedlová and in this case they reproduce some images of young motorcyclists and boys intent on looking at their cell phones picutres that the artist took when she visited the location

They are the visitors of the tower today, those who go on pilgrimage to this isolated region to try to find something lost, a feeling or an emotion, which takes them back to the past, but which fails to emerge even in the nostalgia.

In the second room a huge semicircular wall acts as a background for a seating area, embroidered by the artist following some of Liberec’s architectural motifs.

Klára Hosnedlová, originally from Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic, 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. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2019); National Theater of Prague (2018); Vila Tugendhat, Brno (2017); hunt kastner, Prague (2016); National Gallery in Prague (2015). His work is part of the collections of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; the Havrlant Art Collection, Prague; Valeria Napoleone, London.

The clear and precise intervention of Hosnedlová in the exhibition space recreates the atmosphere of a ghost place that proposes to be a ‘nest’, as the title of the exhibition says, but where actually one cannot even find room for nostalgia. The technological and communicative drive so longed for and made evident in the postmodern architecture has ended up becoming the sign of an alienating isolation and a substantial lack of communication which is one of the many challenges in the life of humanity in contemporary society.