The exhibition Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel, responds to the theme of the 60th Venice Biennale, Stranieri Ovunque. Foreigners Everywhere, by reflecting on diaspora and displacement, their cultural values and inheritance, between past and present conditions. Responsive is also the approach of artist, Ydessa Hendeles, and curator, Wayne Bearwaldt, in relation to the site of Spazio Berlendis, in Venice. Within this frame, Hendeles presents a primal political scene that, beyond any specific historical determination, sits between archival memory and symbolic imagination, offering a familiar and fictional contribution to the destiny and the perpetual condition that the Jewish community has historically faced. Using different registers such as sound, found-objects, archival documentations, painting, film, sculptural assemblage and site-responsive installations, her work results as an intergenerational contribution to the complex and critical question about cultural identity and inheritance through an ethical positioning. A rigorous philological informs her Notes, a collected series of writings about each specific collected object and image on display, a documentary appendix which whilst providing to historical evidence, it questions the value of truth in history, or in other words, in those “other histories” often remaining opaque.
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
Hendeles intiates a genealogical and biographical discourse through the affective tone that characterizes the image Family Album Photograph, 1946, a family portrait taken after the liberation of the Auschwitz camp and before the family’s immigration to Toronto in 1951, which welcomes and concludes the exhibition scene. Ydessa Hendeles, a Polish-Canadian artist, descendant of a lineage of rabbis and Talmudic scholars, the only daughter of Auschwitz survivors belonging to the Jewish community of Zawiercie, Poland, who emigrated with her family to Canada in 1951, is undoubtedly permeated by affective memories sublimated in terms of fantasy.
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
A voiceover guides the viewer through the exhibition, reciting the ancient Yiddish song titled Dem Alef-Beys (The Alphabet), better known as Oyfin Pripetchick, written by Mark Markovich in the late 18th century and historically connoting the pre-Holocaust era. Voicing the learning of a secular language and a shared destiny, the voice like a found object carves and models the view of the archival film clip, Goose! 2023, footages taken by the artist from a documentary film shot in former Munkàcs, now Mukachevo, Ukraina, in March 1939. As often in Hendels’s practices, the film entails a conceptual circuit with the painting Village Merhants; Street of Yarmalynsti in Polonia, 1897, by the Ukranian-Russian artist, Franz Roubaud, which similarly portraits the scene of a Jewish merchant village in Ukraina under the Russian Empire, with figures carrying their goods and carriages in motion, functioning here as a window to a remote, indefinite past. Repetition and realism are keys for the dilemma suggested by the artist, questioning about historicity and destiny through forms of enactment in painting and film. Symmetrically, Hendeles shows an anachronism that brings the viewer back to the post-Holocaust era. Hendeles puts on display a sculptural assemblage of diverse found objects connotated by a specific symbolism and encrypted inscriptions: an old model of the Volkswagen, Type 1, represented with the coat of arms featuring two tower castle closed by a gate, carries two Louis Vuitton “motoring” travel trunks and is displayed near a Louis Vuitton pic-nic suite, an assemble of collected objects as symbolic of another journey, that of the artist’s family to Toronto and, metaphorically, a journey of hope and freedom.
Portrait of Elizaveta Petrovna, Empress of Russia (1709-1762; reign 1741-1762) after Louis Caravaque, ca. 1750, oil on canvas in a period giltwood and plaster frame; Portrait of Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia (1796-1855, reign 1825-1855), 1839 after Franz Kruger, painted by Lt. Rosenberg, a military artist, active mid-19th c., oil on canvas in period frame in gilded wood and plaster; Portrait of Alexandra Feodoronova, Empress Consort of Russia (born Princess Alix of House by Rhine, 1872-1918, reign: 1894-1918). Hand-coloured photograph, 1895, ca. in a vintage oval mahogany wood frame, gift to dignitaries. Original connotation of photography, by Alexander Ivanovich Pasetti, 1894. Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel”, 2022. Photo: Robert Keziere. Courtesy the Artist. © Ydessa Hendeles
Renewing the dilemma between historicity and destiny, the artist stages a triangulation through portraiture. If the portrait of Elizaveta Petronova, Empress of Russia, 1750, is highly representative of the Age of Enlightenment, Hendeles intends to focus on the regal decorum that distinguishes the sovereign’s coats of arms, jewelry sets and pendants set with baroque pearls to enact a fantastical anachronism. The painting crosses the gaze of the portrait of Emperor Nicholas I, 1839, a ruler and autocrat remembered for his military contribution in Russian-controlled Poland and in particular for his severe military decrees on the Jewish community in this territory. The royal portrait is displayed next to a Gentlemen’s Toiletry Case that functions in the exhibition as a device for mirroring portraits and images. Opposite sits the portrait of Alexandra Feodorovna, 1895, the last Russian empress who died during the Russian Revolution, a symbol of the end of the empire and its influence in the neighboring territories. Collectively, the three portraits allude to the questioning of power and sovereignty, opening through a mise-en-abyme, to a fragmented scene of images and stories that remain untold. The exhibition opens with a scene that sculpturally assembles a series of luxurious wardrobes, travel trunks and memorabilia, displayed as sculptural installations. These are collectibles imbued with emotional memories and signatures, culminating in the repeated image of the Family Album Photograph, 1946. Through this operation, Hendeles suggests how to draw onto texts and images in absentia, suggesting new memories and meanings. Her archival method of inquiry opens to the evocation of stories of diaspora and migration in order to perpetuate their cultural values and legacy.
Ydessa Hendeles, “Grand Hotel” (installation view detail), 2022. Photo: Ricardo Okaranza Sáez de Arregi. © Richardo Okaranza Fotograf
In the end, fantasy and fiction are symbolized by the architectural model Grand Hotel, 19th century, which sits in between these and affective and intellectual circuits and functioning as an inner space of reflection and a place of projective functions. As an European cultural model consolidated at the end of the 19th century, the Grand Hotel has gradually replaced the function of noble palaces with an equally opulent mansion, yet temporary. Hendeles shows how symbolically the Grand Hotel can be taken as an imaginary model to reflect on the condition of identity and cultural disorientation. The ephemeral and diffuse effects of the installation’s light projection transcend any historical determination by reflecting the values of hospitality and hope as an illumination. In this vision, the exhibition Ydessa Hendeless: Grand Hotel establishes a primordial political scene to think about how the promises of the past continue to shape our individual present.
Info:
Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel
Collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt
Spazio Berlendis, Venezia
20/05 – 24/11/2024
www.spazioberlendis.it
She is interested in the visual, verbal and textual aspects of the Modern Contemporary Arts. From historical-artistic studies at the Cà Foscari University, Venice, she has specialized in teaching and curatorial practice at the IED, Rome, and Christie’s London. The field of her research activity focuses on the theme of Light from the 1950s to current times, ontologically considering artistic, phenomenological and visual innovation aspects.
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