March 4–June 4, 2023
Klára Hosnedlová: To Infinity
For her first institutional solo exhibition, Hosnedlová metamorphoses the Kestner Gesellschaft’s former public swimming pool 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 confluence of craft, fashion, design, architecture, sculpture and performance, Hosnedlová choreographs complex, immersive environments of a striking cinematic 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.
Hosnedlová (Uherské Hradiště, Czech Republic, 1990) attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and is currently pursuing her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. She lives and works in Berlin.
Diedrick Brackens: everything I have ever touched
everything I have ever touched is the artist’s first solo show in a European art institution. Composed of an existing body of work as well as of a number of newly produced works, this exhibition is Brackens’ self-reflexive endeavour where radical tenderness, accompanied by a critical intimacy, contributes to the ethics of storytelling and a lyrical representation of masculinity.
Exploring the intersections of identity and sociopolitical issues, Brackens (Mexia, Texas, 1989) creates intricate, handwoven tapestries and textile sculptures that reexamine allegory and narrative through material, autobiography, the broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history and memory.
The material indicates a sensation of tactility as well as it connotes the political dimension: “Historical significance of cotton in the U.S. relating to enslavement, violence and subjugation has had lasting effects on black bodies,” the artist explains. “I think of the process of hand-weaving cotton as a way to pay tribute to those who came before me and worked with the material under very different circumstances.” Brackens’ is a highly intertextual and performative practice which incorporates various traditions and techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works. Often depicting moments of male tenderness, Brackens culls from African and African American literature, poetry and folklore as source.
Brackens lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from the University of North Texas, Denton, TX, and an MFA in Textiles from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA.
The Institute of Queer Ecology: Hysteria
Founded in 2017 by Lee Pivnik and Nicolas Baird, The Institute of Queer Ecology is an ever-evolving, collaborative organism that brings peripheral solutions for environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. It’s projects are interdisciplinary but grounded in the theoretical framework of queer ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multi-species relationality.
Premiering at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hysteria is an original multichannel video installation which proposes an ecofeminist retelling of the poorly understood “dancing plagues” that swept through Europe between the tenth and the seventeenth centuries. The afflicted dancers are subtly recast as pointedly subversive agents entangled in environmental contagion and contamination that drive these wild, manic uprisings.
Rodrigo Hernández: Flux of Things
Reminiscent of haiku, Rodrigo Hernández’ works are lyrical explorations of most intimate moments of human relationships and the metaphysical states of mind. For Kestner Gesellschaft’s facade, the artist conceived a silver tableau at a confluence of his narrative language and the modernist grid of the architectural pattern. Meditative and sublime, Flux of Things is a horizontal storyboard of the everyday and mundane, composed of a sequence of loosely connected images that combine the nocturnal and the daily, peacefully unfolding as the passerby walks along.
Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, Mexico, 1983) lives in Mexico City. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, and at Jan Van Eyck Akademie in Maastricht.
[ɡəˈzɛlʃaft]
Concept: Luis Kürschner & Patryk Kujawa.
With Max Bergmann, Asta Gröting, Aleksandra Saša Jeremić, Charlotte Kremberg, Patryk Kujawa, Luis Kürschner, Eileen Raddatz, Luca Rohringer und Luisa Walther (artists and students gathered around the class of Asta Gröting at the Braunschweig University of Art).
What would happen if a hacking attack on the Kestner Gesellschaft took place?
Just as the internet is permeated with hate, [ɡəˈzɛlʃaft] intends to use the Kestner Gesellschaft as a public institution for love speech. We want to infect the hardware of the building with a new operating system. A software of love which infects the physical spaces. Like a virus, love installs itself in the space, always inhabited and moved by the presence of the anonymous parasites.
[ɡəˈzɛlʃaft] is part of Future Scenarios—a nomadic and parasitic exhibition format of ephemeral character that responds to the architecture of the Kestner Gesellschaft and pursues a strategy of unexpected appearance and disruption as a mode of operation.
Finissage performance: June 4, 2023, 8pm
MJ Harper: Arias For A New World
MJ Harper (Port Antonio, Jamaica, 1987) is a Berlin-based artist working across dance, choreography, and opera. He describes his practice as “Tanz Theatre for the algorithmic age”. His Arias For A New World is a web of ritual, religion, eroticism, stories, voice, music, gestures, elegance, and attitude, which, bundled like a figurative sculpture, finds its channel onto the stage and into the space.
