Exhibition at White Cube, in London, transforms embroidery, sculpture and performance into an archaeological environment of the future
Between metallic structures, monumental tapestries and growing organic forms, the Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová Build on “Echo”, your exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey, a total environment that investigates time as plastic matter.
Born in 1990, part of the first post-communist generation in the Czech Republic, Hosnedlová develops a practice that articulates architecture, sculpture, embroidery and performance in site-specific installations. His work is based on research on modern Central European utopias and their contemporary reverberations, combining references to brutalism, science fiction, and the region's artisanal traditions.
In “Echo”, running until March 29, 2026, the exhibition space is converted into a kind of archaeological excavation of the future. Industrial structures and metal platforms are occupied by sandstone reliefs, hyperrealistic embroidery, and organic masses cultivated with mycelium and reishi fungi. The landscape suggests a post-natural setting, where human remains coexist with ongoing biological processes.
At the center of Hosnedlová's practice is manual embroidery, developed from photographs produced by the artist herself. Before each exhibition, she stages private performances inside the structures she builds. These records become the basis for panels embroidered with silk or cotton thread, executed over months.
The resulting images show fragments of bodies and gestures suspended in time: hands holding a burning match, fingers marking surfaces with charcoal, mouths adorned with dental jewelry. Gesture, often associated with primary technologies such as fire or drawing, appears as an instrument of memory and transmission.
Embroidery, traditionally associated with the craft and domestic fields, is moved to a monumental scale and inserted into an architectural scenography. In doing so, Hosnedlová tightens the boundaries between art, craft, and spatial construction, treating yarn as a means of historical inscription.
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, the artist developed consistent research on modernist and brutalist architecture in Central Europe. In his work, buildings are understood as future archaeological remains — structures that will bear, for future generations, marks of ideologies and collective desires.
In “Echo”, this logic materializes in raised platforms, metal walls, and fossilized sculptures. Industrial elements are combined with natural fibers, stone and mineralized resin. The contrast between steel and organic matter reinforces the sense of a world in transition, where industrial past and biological growth are intertwined.
The exhibition space ceases to be a neutral container and begins to operate as an organism. Fragments of abandoned costumes, scattered leaves, and marks on surfaces suggest the recent passage of bodies. Human presence is insinuated, never central.
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The notion of “echo” works as a structural principle of exposure. Elements from previous projects reappear reconfigured, creating continuity between different exhibitions. Ideas are not repeated, but transformed.
By incorporating living fungi and biological growth processes, Hosnedlová introduces time as an active agent. The work is not static: it alters, matures and reacts to the environment. The sound, developed as part of the installation, expands this dimension, adding temporal layers to the physical space.
Instead of proposing a linear narrative, “Echo” suggests that time can be compressed, accumulated, and reactivated. The artisanal past, utopian modernism, and a post-human imaginary coexist on the same plane.
With recent exhibitions at institutions such as Kunsthalle Basel and Hamburger Bahnhof, Hosnedlová consolidates a practice that treats installation as a total environment. Each project is conceived as a closed system, where sculpture, image and performance operate interdependently.
In “Echo”, the artist does not present isolated objects, but a territory. The installation works as a tension field between industrial matter and living matter, between historical memory and speculative projection.
The result is neither a dystopian nor a celebratory vision of the future. It is a suspended space, where the visitor walks through a landscape that seems both ancient and yet to come.
