Leeza Negelev & Katie Kearns - To close a small distance (exhibition)

Name: Leeza Negelev & Katie Kearns - To close a small distance (exhibition)
Start: 2025-09-07T17:00:00+02:00
End: 2025-09-12T22:00:00+02:00
Location: Hosek Contemporary

Schedule

Sun, 07 Sep, 2025 at 05:00 pm to Fri, 12 Sep, 2025 at 10:00 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

Hosek Contemporary | Berlin, BE

Hošek Contemporary is pleased to host 'To close a small distance', an exhibition by Leeza Negelev & Katie Kearns.
Opening Reception: September 7th, 2025 at 5 pm
Tuesday September 9th at 7 PM - Performance by Departure Duo: Edward Kass (double bass) + Nina Guo (soprano). Admission: €10.
Thursday September 11th, 2025 at 6 PM - Performance by Cara Dawson - To close a small distance: New works for Pedal and Lever Harp. Admission: €10.
Closing Reception: September 11th, 2025 at 6 pm
Exhibition period: September 7th-12th
Open daily 2-6 pm and during the events of the gallery
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.
Music performances by Supercluster (dejana sekulić, violin + Victor Guaita Igual, viola), Departure Duo (Edward Kass, double bass + Nina Guo, soprano) and harpist Cara Dawson (days and times to be announced closer to the date).
Support provided by Studio 170 / Germany at Goethe-Institut Boston
PERFORMANCES:
Thursday September 11th, 2025 at 6 PM
Performance by Cara Dawson - 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.

About the artists:
Leeza Negelev was raised in Brooklyn and Boston by three generations of Soviets from Uzbekistan. Her bicultural upbringing honed an interest in the way observation can determine experience. Her current research explores the aesthetic possibilities of attention. Leeza is curious about the active quality of her materials and paintings, which develop through a tension between formal analysis and a sensory-driven, dialogical approach. Her installations, paintings, and sound art have been exhibited in the United States and internationally. She has received multiple awards for her work and been selected for exhibition by curators such as Sharon Butler, Jamaal Barber, Erika B. Hess, Ornis Althuis, and Jeanine Hofland, among others. Leeza holds an MFA in Studio Art from the Welch School of Art and Design. She lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.
Originally from Florida and having lived throughout the Southern United States, Katie Kearns’ work reflects on the interplay of memory, identity, and place. After earning their MFA from Georgia State University, they joined Kollektive Un1 Gallery and Atelier in Berlin. Their background is in the field of ceramics; they graduated with a BFA from Florida Atlantic University in 2014, after which they participated in a long-term artist residency at the Morean Center for Clay and attended the Post Baccalaureate program at Louisiana State University. Katie’s recent work examines the way form and material can be a vessel for memory, offering familiar domestic objects that evoke feelings of comfort and identification, and disrupting these readings through surrealist interventions. These interventions are moments to "queer" the viewer’s expectations, offering a moment to reflect on their own relationship to their environment.
The gallery is located at
Motor Ship HEIMATLAND
Märkisches Ufer 1z
10 179 Berlin-Mitte
+49 1525 7486496
www.hosekcontemporary.com