The Post Berlin Show
Art Exhibit/Fundraiser
Kate Hollett /Canadian Womens Foundation
Opening TBD Show Dates Anon
Kate Hollett: Fractured Forms, Unbroken Voice By River Barlow
In the shifting terrain of contemporary art, Kate Hollett stands as an artist both disrupted and unshaken. For over 25 years, the Canadian-born Hollett has pushed against the edges of visual language and emotional articulation, weaving a practice that is at once intimate, political, and formally experimental.
Her early work centered around a deceptively simple phrase: “I love you.” This inquiry into emotional transmission manifested first in paint, then in moving image. Her debut video—an unembellished yet profound collage of over 200 individuals uttering those three words—garnered wide recognition, screening at the LA Short Film Festival and earning Best of Show at the Detroit Museum of New Art.
But it was a traumatic rupture—a near-fatal car accident—that redirected Hollett’s trajectory. In its aftermath, she found herself psychologically unable to return to painting. Instead, she turned to video and installation, media that allowed her to process fragmentation and narrative in new ways. During a residency in Belfast, she produced “Yes/No – And the Space In-Between,” a searing piece drawn from over 2,000 interviews with Catholics and Protestants. The work revealed not just the politics of identity, but the psychology of division—a haunting map of belief, fear, and the architecture of disagreement.
In “Mind Chatter, Moments of Beauty”, Hollett moved deeper still. Housed inside a giant sculptural head, her layered video and audio installation dissected internal monologue, dividing it across left, right, and central channels—externalizing the invisible churn of thought. The result was less a narrative than a landscape of cognition, rich in both beauty and interruption.
Berlin—originally a temporary stop—quickly became home. Within its fertile artistic ecosystem, Hollett’s work was curated into a neuroaesthetics symposium at Humboldt and she was invited to create a groundbreaking social-art course at Lüneberg University. Her “I Love You” project expanded across Europe, concluding in Israel and Palestine amid growing political threats.
A decade after stepping away from painting, Hollett returned—transformed. Her new work in realism doesn’t reject abstraction but plays against it, invoking a dialogue between clarity and distortion, form and feeling. Hollett returned to Toronto after 10 years in Berlin to a changed world. The pandemic offered rare solitude, and with it, a deep dive into personal mythologies. These paintings are acts of recovery, excavation, and reinvention.
Most recently, during a residency in Brooklyn, Hollett turned her gaze toward feminism—this time through cake. The work is vivid, sculptural, unapologetically graphic. The cakes are not celebrations; they are statements—biting, ironic, and defiantly female.
Her current exhibition, The Post Berlin Show, gathers these threads—fracture and rediscovery, precision and play—into a meditation on wholeness. Hollett’s voice remains unbroken. It simply shifts form, again and again, to say what must be said.
Summer 2025
• I SEE YOU • I SEE YOU SEE ME
• I REALLY SEE YOU • EAT ME
The Post Berlin Show unfolds into four parts. It began in Berlin & continued in Toronto, tracing a journey of personal and artistic transformation. It is an expansion of perception – a dance between curiosity and vulnerability, play and provocation. In the pursuit of beauty, the work dares to explore what lies beneath the surface, where shadow and light meet in quiet tension.
I SEE YOU
When I recovered my ability to paint, I spent hours sketching in Berlin cafés and on the S-Bahn. I found beauty in life’s contradictions – hard-working bodies marked by struggle, yet moving with resilience, grace, even hope. There was beauty in the deviance, in the quiet dignity of survival – a red balloon drifting, a kite rising against the wind.
I see you, even as we pass in this long good night. I see it in your smile, the way you carry your story with lightness. Your hardships, though not erased, have been folded into the strength you bring each day.
I SEE YOU SEE ME
While in Berlin, I visited the Venice Biennale. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people taking selfies everywhere. And yet, beneath the surface of performance, there was joy. Excitement. Love. The act felt strangely participatory, a kind of choreography—fleeting gestures of connection, reflections of a shared moment.
When I see a selfie I see the person looking at others, the image is for the other’s gaze. It is a dialogue unfolding. There is a celebration of the relationship – we see you and you see us seeing you – a delicate exchange woven through the act of looking.
I REALLY SEE YOU
Back in Toronto, I turned inward, returning to my past, both literally and figuratively, with the intention of shaping moments of beauty from memory. It felt like growing in reverse, or perhaps coming full circle. What I uncovered was beauty and the tension that gave rise to it – the darkness that made the light meaningful – shadow and shine as one. In their union a deeper story emerged.
I really see you, I see beyond the façade, the stories and defenses. I see the essence, a soul bared naked, vulnerable and unsure. I see fullness in the depth of emotions.
.
EAT ME
This work was first developed for an artist residency in New York Spring 2025.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from looking inward, it’s that growing up female often felt like a weapon wielded against me. My gender was used to limit, to define, to control.
In that context, making a cake shaped like a vagina feels profoundly fitting. Especially now, as we witness a fierce backlash against women’s rights—most painfully visible in the recent undoing of abortion laws across the United States—my anger reignited. This erosion of hard-won freedoms demands a response. I wanted to be bold, to be unapologetically in your face. Baking as a stereotype traditionally tied to women, was the perfect medium: twisted into a form that challenges and confronts, a domestic act turned radical, a sweet gesture transformed into a statement of defiance and visibility.
The Post Berlin Show • Kate Hollett
Art Exhibit/Fundraiser
It’s all about the process…