Ydessa Hendeles: Death to Pigs

Ydessa Hendeles is a Canadian artist whose ingenuitive approach informs her compelling practice. By using the exhibition as a medium, Hendeles not only questions the role of the artist, curator, and collector, but also puts the present art system to the test.

Death to Pigs is the first comprehensive retrospective in Europe dedicated to Hendeles, compiling some of the central complexes of works the artist has created over the past thirteen years into a multi-layered narrative.

Informed by topics such as collection and recollection, and inspired by cabinets of curiosities and the associated quest for traces of the past, her œuvre is mostly composed of found, often historical, objects and artefacts, which she integrates into an exhibition context or combines in complex, expansive installations.

The installation Death to Pigs is a key to the eponymous exhibition, addressing attributions, stigmatization and power dynamics on a metaphorical level. Other installations manifest themselves as compact superimpositions of meticulously researched cultural and historical contents and autobiographical references, recontextualized for the exhibition with new components.

Characterized by a fusion of experiences, accounts, and interpretations, her compositions develop independent narratives and convey reflections on belonging and exclusion. Hendeles’s œuvre is closely linked to her own biography as the daughter of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s. She not only reflects on her own life and myriad experiences, but alludes to basic forms of human nature. Examining mechanisms of social behavior and their relation to perceptions of “otherness,” the narratives that emerge from her artworks are both universal and specific.

Hendeles’s interpretative readings remind us of the dialectics of social evolutions. In her works, she looks back on the past to comment on our future, a future that can only be understood through its global interconnectedness.

Curator: Nicolaus Schafhausen

Ydessa Hendeles (*1948 in Marburg) currently divides her time between studios in Toronto and New York. She studied at the University of Toronto, the New School of Art (Toronto), the Toronto Art Therapy Institute and holds a PhD from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis of the University of Amsterdam. She taught art history at the New School of Art and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Toronto. In October 2017, Hendeles was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Philipps-Universität Marburg.

In 1980, she established The Ydessa Gallery, Toronto, where she represented exclusively Canadian artists such as Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Jana Sterbak, Jeff Wall and Krzysztof Wodiczko. In In 1987, she launched the exhibition program of the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto, and in 1988 opened Canada’s first privately funded exhibition venue for contemporary art. By the time its building closed in 2012, the Foundation had mounted more than 35 major curated exhibitions. Hendeles began to incorporate her own artistic projects into the exhibitions at the Foundation in the early 1990s. Her work has also been exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2003); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2004); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010); Marburger Kunstverein, Germany (2010); Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2011); König Galerie, Berlin (2012); ICA, London (2015); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany (2016); Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel (2016); New Museum, New York (2016); and The Power Plant, Toronto (2017).