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Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel

“Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel” is a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, presented by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and mounted at Spazio Berlendis. Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, working in collaboration with Project Producer Barbara Edwards, the site-responsive exhibition explores themes of cultural identity, displacement, otherness, intergenerational trauma, and loss linking the past to the present.

Ydessa Hendeles’s practice has always sought to give artistic expression to the multigenerational effects of traumatic displacement and the ensuing psychological and physical barriers to rebuilding community and a sense of belonging. Her history as the only child of Auschwitz survivors who crossed frontiers and an ocean to rebuild their lives inevitably informs her work. Though born in Germany, she is a Polish-Canadian dual national with deep family roots in Poland as the descendant of a line of rabbis and Talmudic scholars. The Nazi’s program to eradicate Jews made hers the generation that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“Grand Hotel” is set in a country emerging from the wreckage of war. The scenario envisages a family or group of close friends who are on the road like tourists. But what are the circumstances of their journey? Does the carefree transience of leisure travel mask a fraught odyssey to safety and emotional security? And where is the journey’s end? Is it built on dreams of new beginnings or nightmares of past traumas?

Image credits:

1. Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel” (detail), 2022
Family-album photograph, “Sommer 1946” (gelatin silver print, with hand-written annotation in ink on recto, original print: 6 x 9 cm)
Collection of Ydessa Hendeles. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles

2. Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel” (detail), 2022
Photo: Robert Keziere. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles

3. Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel” (detail), 2022
Photo: Robert Keziere. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles

4. Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel” (detail), 2022
Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles

9. Ydessa Hendeles, “Goose!” (still), 2023
Video with sound
Found documentary footage, March 1939, from Munkács, Hungary
Sequence of moving images, looped and paired with a recording of “Oyfn Pripetchik,” a Yiddish folksong published in 1899 by Mark Warshawsky (1848–1907), performed by Michał Hochman (Polish-American, 1944–2024)
Display dimensions: 36 x 65 cm (14 x 25 inches)
Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles