Katie Kearns, Tell Me You Love Me, Wood, Aqua Resin, cement, Home Depot buckets, hot glue, crepe paper, wire, acrylic paint
Opening at Hošek Contemporary, Berlin on 7 September 2025 at 17:00
Performances
09.09.25 | 19:00 Departure Duo - To close a small distance: Between Sound
Edward Kass (double bass) + Nina Guo (soprano). Admission: €10
11.09.25 | 18:00 Cara Dawson - To close a small distance: New works for pedal and lever harp. Admission: €10
Exhibition period: September 7th-12th, Sunday-Friday 14:00–18:00, and during gallery events
About
To close a small distance presents new work by two artists who investigate what is both sensible and near. Addressing a world in which knowledge, experience, and sociality are increasingly oriented towards the virtual, this exhibition offers transdisciplinary perspectives on our entanglement with the material world.
Leeza Negelev’s gestural marks mine the space between established aesthetic ideals and the responsiveness of her materials. To understand this threshold, her new work leans on the language of music. She explores the way our experience with a painting can be time-bound, relational, and singular through an installation that serves as a graphic score, up close and from a distance.
Katie Kearns’ sculptures begin with an interest in domestic objects and spaces. They disrupt the quiet familiarity of an old chair or dresser through surrealist interventions–alluding to the symbiotic way objects appear to absorb memory, as well as the fluidity of queer experience. In doing so, their work invites the viewer to question their own relationship to material, memory, and selfhood.
Expanding on these themes, the exhibition will feature multiple site-specific music performances that investigate the relational and material elements of sound through alternative tuning systems, acoustic and digital sonic landscapes, and works that rely on proximity and distance.
Cara Dawson
11.09.25 | 18:00 To close a small distance - New works for pedal and lever harp
Admission: €10
In response to the exhibition To close a small distance, harpist Cara Dawson presents a program of new works that explore resonance, proximity, and the tactile nature of sound. The concert features solo compositions for both pedal and lever harp, including premieres and works written for her in close collaboration with composers. Several works incorporate electronic tape or alternative tuning systems, blurring the boundaries between acoustic and digital sound worlds. Performed in an intimate setting, the program invites close listening—foregrounding gesture, materiality, and the body’s entanglement with sound. As the final event in the exhibition series, it offers a quiet yet charged sonic response to the artworks that surround it.
Departure Duo
09.09.25 | 19:00 To close a small distance: Between Sounds
Edward Kass (double bass) + Nina Guo (soprano)
Admission: €10
In a space filled with rich visual stimulation, Departure Duo invites you to come close and listen loudly to soft sounds. As the exhibition explores nearness, materiality, and the visual representation of sound, the duo presents a program that probes the space just between sound and silence. Despite the vast distance between traditional soprano and double bass registers, this repertoire brings the two so close together they are at times indistinguishable. What does it mean to experience live acoustic sounds that you cannot identify, even at close proximity? How does your perception of space and time alter when confronted with the very slow and the very soft? Most often, we experience these intimate moments with just one or two other people, but what happens when you experience them as a group? Combining commissions, improvisation, and preexisting works, Departure Duo invites you to listen up close.
Support provided by Studio 170 / Germany at Goethe-Institut Boston
Hošek Contemporary is located at Motor Ship HEIMATLAND Märkisches Ufer 1z 10 179 Berlin-Mitte +49 1525 7486496