Ydessa Hendeles at Kunsthalle Wien

Artist: Ydessa Hendeles

Exhibition title: Death to Pigs

Curated by: Nicolaus Schafhausen

Venue: Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria

Date: February 28 – May 27, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunsthalle Wien

Note: Exhibition booklet can be found here

“My art occupies a fluctuating netherspace between documentary and fantasy. While my own history inevitably informs my work, my interest is in imagining and telling new stories that comment on our common cultural inheritance.” (Ydessa Hendeles)

Death to Pigs is the first comprehensive retrospective in Europe dedicated to Canadian artist Ydessa Hendeles. Her practice is characterised by the fusion of experiences, accounts, and interpretations. Her compositions develop independent narratives and convey reflections on belonging, otherness, and exclusion. Her work tells a history of the 20th century that reflects on how personal as well as national identities have been established over time.

Hendeles’s work is closely linked to her own biography as the daughter of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Canada in the early 1950s. The narratives she develops in her artworks are both universal and specific—they deal with subjects such as loss and alienation, and invite viewers to find or forge a connection.

In her artistic practice, Hendeles not only reflects on her own life and myriad experiences, but also alludes to basic forms of universal understanding.

She examines mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, and their relation to perceptions of “otherness”. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman described modernisation as a process that has not only led to rationalisation and individual freedom, but also to control and social marginalisation. According to Bauman, the onset of industrialisation generated a new world order that did not facilitate integration of all social groups. Instead, supposed “otherness” became reason for indeterminate fears.

Regressive tendencies in contemporary politics and society generate widely discussed notions of “foreignness” and “otherness”. Populist and conservative parties as well as identitarian movements propagate ideas of alleged cultural identity as an assumed simplification of complex connections. Hendeles’s works remind us of the dialectics of social evolutions, and encourage us to learn from history. 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.

Ydessa Hendeles’s œuvre is informed by topics such as collection and recollection, and inspired by cabinets of curiosities as well as the associated quest for traces of the past. The artist frequently works with found, often historical, objects and artefacts, which she integrates into an exhibition context or combines in complex, expansive installations. By using the “exhibition as a medium”, Hendeles not only questions the role of the artist, curator, and collector, but also puts their relationships in the present art system to the test.

The exhibition, on display in both halls of the Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier, weaves some of the central complexes of works the artist has created over the past thirteen years into a multi-layered narrative. The title of the exhibition derives from the installation Death to Pigs (2015–2016), presented in the upper exhibition hall. The work draws on the metaphor of the pig, showing how concepts and ideas about the animal have evolved and changed through cultural history—from fairy tale stories and religious contexts to murders carried out by the Manson family in the summer of 1969 and depictions in the mass media.

The story of the exhibition begins with the work Veronica’s Veil / Tigers’ Tale (2016–2018), that was recreated, augmented, and retitled for Kunsthalle Wien and presents the juxtaposition of two tales conjuring the miraculous and the magical for adults and children. From her wooden sleep… (2013), the central work in the lower exhibition hall, is an expansive arrangement featuring more than 150 historical wooden manikins, which form a seemingly closed society, putting the viewer in the uncomfortable position of an outside observer. The preceding installations, Blue Beard (2016) and Crypt (2016) introduce associated themes such as belonging and exclusion, and the underlying ideologies. Like many works, Canadian Child (2009) is closely linked to the artist’s life and is suggestive of the way the transformation of personal or national identity manifests itself externally.

In the upper exhibition hall, the installations The Dead Jumbo. (2011), THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW (2006–2011), Predators & Prey (The Denslow’s Mother Goose Project) (2005–2017), and Marburg! The Early Bird! (2008–2016) are on display. Marburg— Hendeles’s birthplace, and the first place her parents settled after the horrors of the Holocaust—has close links to the Brothers Grimm, who collected and transcribed fairy tales and legends. Fairy tales play a central role in Hendeles’s work. She traces the way fantasy worlds and stories for children reflect ideologies to show how certain belief and value systems are deeply anchored and infuse everyday life.

THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW (2006–2011) deals with post-war culture and the aftermath of trauma. It reflects on the disruption arising when a grave responsibility deriving from the past conflicts with a hopeful contemplation of the future. Modernism, technological development, and the aspirations associated are impeded by the psychological and emotional burdens that restrict the individual’s ability to act. Ultimately, the work is about finding a place in the world within the context of history, generation, culture, and nationality. Hendeles’s newly created site -specific work The Eagle and the Hare (2017) addresses the eagle as an ambiguous symbol of the divine and the demonic, protector and aggressor.

The works in the exhibition Death to Pigs present themselves as dense overlays of intensely researched cultural, historical, and autobiographical references. In their dramaturgy, they unfold in a subjective view of cultural history that relates to diverse social developments. The result is a multi-layered narrative that shows how socially constructive forces were used destructively time and again, how utopian ideas turned dystopian.

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Detail from THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW, 2006–2011, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Foto: Stephan Wyckoff: Detail from The Dead Jumbo., 2011, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Canadian Child, 2009, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: From her wooden sleep…, 2013, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Detail from Crypt, 2016, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Prize, 2015: Detail from Death to Pigs, 2015–2016, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Installation view: Ydessa Hendeles. Death to Pigs, Kunsthalle Wien 2018, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Detail from From her wooden sleep…, 2013, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist

Ydessa Hendeles, Princess (1964), 2015: Leslie Van Houten as Homecoming Princess, 1964; Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, George Orwell, 1945: detail from Death to Pigs, 2015–2016, Installation view: Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, 2016, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Robert Keziere

Ydessa Hendeles, THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW (Aero-Car No. 500), 2011: detail from THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW, 2006–2011, Installation view: König Galerie, Berlin, 2012, © Ydessa Hendeles, Courtesy the artist, Photo: Robert Keziere