EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE HOUSE OF ECHOES: ON YDESSA HENDELES

JENS HOFFMANN

July 9, 2025

Some exhibitions aren’t made to instruct or explain, but to evoke, disturb, and slow us down. They don’t translate life into objects—they give form to its shadows. Here, the exhibition becomes a medium of its own: part moral inquiry, part memory theater, part whispered verse, part intimate archive. What lingers is not just what we see, but what we feel pressing in from the margins—what’s missing, forgotten, or deliberately withheld. Ydessa Hendeles is one of the rare artists who inhabits this unique terrain.

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Ydessa Hendeles does not paint, sculpt, or photograph. What she creates is something else entirely: haunted architectures built from memory, emotion, and refusal. Her exhibitions do not interpret or explain, but resonate in silence. They speak through the glint of vitrine glass, the stillness of an empty chair, the worn fabric of a doll’s dress, the button eye of a teddy bear. She offers situations—precise and poetic constructions in which the unspeakable is invited to linger, to breathe. To enter a Hendeles exhibition is to enter an ethics of looking. The viewer is implicated. This is not passive seeing, but an experience laced with discomfort, delay, and repetition. Her arrangements—meticulous, obsessive, charged—conjure atmospheres. The object becomes a cipher, the gallery a séance.

In a time when so much art is loud, you might say that Hendeles has made silence her medium. Silence, and repetition, and refusal. Her shows are not meant to be “understood” in any direct way.

Ydessa Hendeles, Grand Hotel, 2022–24 (detail). Foreground: architectural model, Italian, 19th century, wood, pressed paper, glass, iron, electric lights, 148 x 148 x 108 cm, on a custom-made mahogany pedestal. Photo: Jorit Aust, courtesy the artist, © Ydessa Hendeles

When I entered Grand Hotel, part of the 2024 Venice Biennale program of collateral events, it felt less like visiting an exhibition than walking into a dream half-remembered from childhood. Hendeles had transformed the space into a room of psychological inquiry and historical excavation. Drawing on the aesthetics of early twentieth-century hospitality, her conjured, haunted interior echoed with traces of vanished guests and suppressed traumas. At the entrance, I stopped before a black-and-white photograph captioned “Sommer 1946.” In it, her parents—Holocaust survivors—sit on a 1938 Opel somewhere in postwar Germany. The image is quietly radiant. Not hopeful, exactly, but defiant. A family paused at the far edge of ruin, looking forward, if only slightly. 

Ydessa Hendeles, Grand Hotel, 2022–24 (detail). Family-album photograph, gelatin silver print, with handwritten annotation, “Sommer 1946,” in ink, 6 x 9 cm. Courtesy the artist. © Ydessa Hendeles

The artist’s parents, Jacob Hendeles (1916–1987) and Dorothy Hendeles (née Dworja Cwajgiel, 1916–2012), seated on the front bumper of their recently purchased used prewar automobile, pose with family, friends, and pet dogs on a motoring trip in Germany. Dorothy’s older brother, Karl Cwajgiel (1912–1988), is standing on the far right.

Knowing their story—that they had survived the unimaginable, namely Auschwitz and later Bergen-Belsen, and tried to piece together a life afterward—changed everything. Her mother had been a hatmaker, her father a man of deep resolve and reserve. In 1951, they emigrated to Toronto, where they rebuilt their lives in a city that offered safety, but not forgetfulness. Hendeles grew up in the shadows of that survival, in a home marked by both gratitude and absence. Her parents weren’t just subjects in a photograph; they were the emotional architecture of Hendeles’s entire project. The exhibitions are, in some sense, acts of repair—not nostalgic, but forensic. The artist doesn’t mourn the past so much as examine its residue, its pressure, the way it shifts a life’s trajectory. Her parents don’t appear often, but they are everywhere, like a low-frequency humming underneath the work. Their survival is the precondition for the art, and their silence its undertone.

On the other end of the exhibition sat a 1953 Volkswagen Beetle, restored to a pearlescent sheen, its split pretzel-shaped back window gleaming. It wore Ontario plates and carried Louis Vuitton luggage strapped to the roof—less prop than apparition. In this context, the car didn’t illustrate a particular story—it extended the sense of passage, of being between places, times, and identities. It became part of Hendeles’s vocabulary of transience.

Hotels are strange places. They pretend permanence but are built for transience. I’ve always thought of them as stages for borrowed identities—someplace to sign in under a new name, stay a while, and disappear. Grand Hotel played with that idea, not as metaphor but as condition. It felt like checking into a place that knew too much about leaving.

The show took place at Spazio Berlendis, the former carpentry shop of an old boatyard known as Squero Vecio, near the Ospedale Civile in Venice. You could smell the salt in the air. When I stepped outside, the first thing I saw was the Isola di San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island, hovering on the water like a final footnote. I don’t think that was accidental. Hendeles had composed her surroundings as carefully as she had her vitrines. The hotel, the hospital next door, the graveyard—lodging, care, disappearance. They converged like coordinates on a map of impermanence.

Ydessa Hendeles, Marburg! The Early Bird! (Church & State), 2008 (detail). “Puss in Boots” key-wind clockwork automaton, Roullet et Decamps, France, ca. 1900; eagle lectern, German, 19th century; bisque-head articulated mannequin in regimental uniform, attributed to Maison Jumeau, France, ca. 1885; truncheon pistol, English, designed by John Day, ca. 1830; armchair, Chinese, 20th century; Märchen nach Perrault neu erzählt von Moritz Hartmann. Illustriert von Gustav Doré, two copies of the third edition, Eduard Hallberger, Germany, ca. 1870; davenport desk, English, ca. 1880; folding spectacles, Chinese, ca. 1850; four “Canary Songster” brass whistles, American, 1920s; oversize pince-nez, unknown maker, early 20th century; sighthound stirrup cup, British, ca. 1840; anatomical teaching model of human eye, workshop of Stephan Zick, Germany, 18th century; mahogany-and-glass vitrine, 252.7 x 350.5 x 238.1 cm. Exhibition: Death to Pigs, 2018, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. Photo: Robert Keziere, courtesy the artist, © Ydessa Hendeles

Hendeles’s earlier exhibitions resonated with this approach. Marburg! The Early Bird! (2010), presented in the German town of the artist’s birth, was also the first exhibition she signed fully as an artist, no longer identifying as just a curator. The assembled mannequins, architectural fragments, and allusions to fairy tales formed a disorienting, deeply personal mise-en-scène whose references spanned from the Brothers Grimm to her own childhood, but nothing was offered plainly. Instead, the installation unfolded like a riddle, elliptical and unresolved.

Ydessa Hendeles, Predators & Prey (The Denslow’s Mother Goose Project), 2005 (detail). Commercial display automaton of Denslow’s Mother Goose, American, ca. 1901; “Long-Faced” Bébé Jumeau doll, Maison Jumeau, Montreuil-sous-Bois, France, ca. 1885; child’s chair, Gustav Stickley (American, 1858–1942), ca. 1905; hand-cut “cobweb” card, ca. 1840; first edition of Denslow’s Mother Goose, illustrated by William Wallace Denslow (American, 1956–1915), 1901; mahogany-and-glass vitrine, 205 x 177 x 156 cm. Exhibition: Predators & Prey, 2006–8, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

The first time I encountered any of this—any of her—was in 2007, during a visit to the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in Toronto. As if by a quiet alignment of time and place, two exhibitions were on view simultaneously: Predators & Prey (2006–8) on the main floor, and Dead! Dead! Dead! (2007–8) above it, as if one show had climbed the stairs into the other. They were connected—not just thematically, but through spatial rhythm and emotional charge—like two chapters of the same story told in different registers. They felt related, like seasons in the same year—each with its own mood.

Predators & Prey began as an excavation of history’s leftovers—objects that refused to recede into the past. A tea and coffee set bearing the logo of the Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei, operator of the Hindenburg, gleamed with the aura of catastrophe.

Heinrich & Co., Bavaria, Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin tea/coffee service, 1928–37 (detail). Service consists of two cups and saucers, creamer, sugar bowl with lid, coffee or tea pot with lid in ivory porcelain decorated with gilt and tooled-gold bands with Zeppelin insignias. The cups bear the emblematic Nazi eagle and swastika logo of the Third Reich incorporated into the Zeppelin symbol. From the exhibition Predators & Prey, 2006–8, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles © Ydessa Hendeles

Most pieces bore the streamlined insignia of airship-era ambition, while several cups were marked with a modified version of the zeppelin logo surmounted by the Nazi eagle and swastika. Studded gold-leather Gucci stilettos shimmered like weapons, suspended between seduction and threat. An ivory mannequin of a newborn child sat with unnerving delicacy. A nineteenth-century vampire-killing kit, so lavish it verged on parody, lay like a prank played on reason. André Kertész’s The House of Silence (1928), the first photo-essay, and a significant step in the development of photojournalism. Photographs that suggested stillness as menace—making public the secret life of cloistered Trappist monks in Soligny, France. Another gallery held original press images from the 1937 Hindenburg disaster—shockingly caught in the process of collapse, hovering in the midst of failure. A stereoscope card of a stork delivering a baby lingered in the viewer, which sat beside a bentwood Thonet chair as if someone had just stepped away mid-fantasy, leaving behind the apparatus of wishful thinking.

Everything in the show posed the same silent question: Who is the predator? Who is the prey? The answers shifted with each step. Ambiguity wasn’t a theme; it was the air itself. The exhibition didn’t explain. It pressed. It hovered. It unstitched the edges between glamour and cruelty, intimacy and surveillance, ornament and indictment.

André Kertész, The House of Silence, 1928 (detail). Selection of 16 unique vintage gelatin silver prints (1928) and 44 unique contact gelatin silver prints (1950s–early 1960s) from Kertész’s ground-breaking photojournalistic series documenting the Motherhouse of the Trappist Order, Notre-Dame de la Grande Trappe, Soligny, France. Installation includes 22 framed photographs, each illuminated by a custom-made articulated wall-mounted picture lamp; and 17 presentation sheets displayed in a custom-made mahogany and glass vitrine and illuminated by a pair of hand-hammered copper lanterns, designed by Gustav Stickley (American, 1858–1942), ca. 1905, with hand-blown uranium glass cylinders and suspended on hand-wrought chains. Exhibition: Predators & Prey, 2006–8, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

Upstairs, in Dead! Dead! Dead!, the violence grew stranger and sharper, more theatrical, and above all, more silent. Hendeles’s own Survivors (The Punch and Judy Project) (2006)—a sprawling installation composed of twelve sets of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Punch and Judy glove puppets—took center stage. Grotesque and immobilized, they appeared to perform a pantomime of cruelty without sound, without end. A hunter turned. A rabbit flinched. I could no longer tell who was in control. That, perhaps, was the revelation: The line between hunter and hunted wasn’t a line at all, but a loop.

At the center of it all was Living and Presumed Dead, James Coleman’s seminal installation from 1983–85—a multimedia fusion of cinema, theater, photography, literature (and puppets). But the story did not unfold; it stalled, rewound, and misfired. Slide by slide, characters in period costume flickered in and out of view, frozen mid-gesture in what felt like a rehearsal for a play no one had written. A son avenging his father’s death. A murder hovering, unconfirmed. Names echoing from behind a curtain: Capax. Chris. The voice-over unraveled like a dispatch from a foggy nightmare—narrating without grounding. Time circled back on itself. Each image felt like a clue to a riddle the work refused to solve. The scene was theatrical, but drained of climax. A detective story without detection. A stage play without a script. The crime, if there was one, seemed to reside not in the narrative but in the act of looking.

Beyond that central installation, more fragments emerged. Joan Crawford’s charm bracelets sparkled like costume armor. Charles Ray’s Handheld Bird (2006), delicate and embryonic, echoed the ivory mannequin below—both arrested in their own stillness. Robert Gober’s Untitled (Shoe) (1990) sat like the last step of someone who never returned. Katharina Fritsch’s Pistole (Pistol, 2006) rested in a kind of cold repose, an icon emptied of action.

Something shifted in me that day—something about what an exhibition could be, how it might behave like a memory, or a wound. Since then, I’ve followed Hendeles’s work the way one reads a long, unsolved novel: slowly, obsessively, one haunted room at a time. It wasn’t simply that the exhibitions revealed something—it was that they rearranged the furniture of perception itself. What I saw that first day has never quite settled. It remains suspended, not as memory, but as a kind of permanent afterimage—fragmentary, flickering—burned into the mind’s eye. It was the moment I understood that an exhibition could be something else altogether: a disturbance, a poem, a novel, and something more elusive still—something that rearranges you.

Thomas “Professor Roselia” Rose (British, 1873–ca. 1941), Punch and Judy Theater, ca. 1937. Hand-painted wood, canvas skirt, iron hardware, painted with the likenesses of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to commemorate their coronation on May 12, 1937. Exhibition: Dead! Dead! Dead!, 2007–8, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

This theater was built by Thomas Rose of Suffolk, England, a Punchman who performed as “Professor Roselia” for holidaymakers on the pier at Great Yarmouth every summer from the 1880s to 1940. A skilled carver and painter, he became one of the most admired Punchmen of his day, and especially for the puppets he made for his shows. After Rose’s death, this theater was owned by two British Punchmen, Percy Press Sr. (1902–1980) and then Glyn Edwards (b. 1944).

Ydessa Hendeles, Survivors (The Punch and Judy Project), 2006 (detail). James H. Sharp (American, 1830–1908), American Judy puppet, “Julianne,” ca. 1870. Hand-carved and painted head, hands and feet, cotton dress. Exhibition: Dead! Dead! Dead!, 2007–8, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto.

Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

James H. Sharp, a Union soldier who lost his left hand in the US Civil War, traveled throughout Pennsylvania as a puppeteer after the war. He was killed and all his puppets were thought to be destroyed when he was involved in a wagon accident in 1908. This puppet, rediscovered in 1945, represents Julianne, wife of Peter Hauntz, a German American variant of the Punch and Judy story tradition.

Dead! Dead! Dead! was followed by Strait-Jacket (2009–12), an exhibition composed of subtle shifts and deliberate echoes. At its center were the same gold charm bracelets once worn by Joan Crawford—first glimpsed in Dead! Dead! Dead!—now transformed into both icon and title. Crawford had worn them in the 1964 B-movie Strait-Jacket, playing a woman undone by violence. What began as personal adornment became cinematic prop, and finally, an exhibition’s gravitational core.

With Strait-Jacket, Hendeles explored what happens when an existing structure is rewired—quietly, precisely, over time. Works were swapped out, rearranged. Most notably, James Coleman’s installation gave way to Pipilotti Rist’s diptych Ever Is Over All (1997). Seen together, across the years, Dead! Dead! Dead! and Strait-Jacket began to feel less like consecutive shows and more like a single, evolving organism—one that shifted subtly with every substitution, each change of temperature or tone. Hendeles seemed to be testing the elasticity of a display: How long could a composition stretch before it became something else entirely?

Charm bracelet owned and assembled by Joan Crawford (American, 1905–1977), 1937–1950s. 14K gold woven double-link bracelet with five gold charms in the form of a heart, Aries, heart with bow, poodle, and medallion. From the exhibitions Dead! Dead! Dead!, 2007–8 and Strait-Jacket, 2009–12, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles © Ydessa Hendeles

The medallion charm, bearing the monogram “JCT” and inscribed “To Joan All my love Franchot, October 11, 1937,” was a gift from Hollywood actor Franchot Tone (American, 1905–1968), Crawford’s second husband. The pearl and gold heart charm is inscribed, “Joan I love you Brian Christmas 1949). “Brian” is likely David Brian (American, 1910–1993), a costar to Crawford in three movies from 1949 to 1952. The poodle charm is inscribed “JC,” “3-23-51” and “BUTCH.” “Butch” is Cesar Romero (American, 1907–1994), another Hollywood star of the period and a close friend. The inscribed date marks Crawford’s forty-sixth birthday. The gold heart and ruby bow charm is inscribed, “for You my heart and with it – all my admiration – my respect – and my love The Guy.” No date. The identity of “The Guy” is unknown.

In The Milliner’s Daughter (2017), her solo exhibition at The Power Plant, Toronto, Hendeles gave us something like autobiography but never said so outright. Evoking her hatmaker mother, the show was filled with hat forms and articulated mannequins that evoked bodies in absentia. There were other objects, too, that seemed like clues but refused solution. It was autobiographically inspired, but not autobiographical. It wasn’t telling a story. It was setting a trap for feeling.

Not long after seeing Predators & Prey and Dead! Dead! Dead!, I had the chance to meet the artist in Toronto. I remember standing there, overwhelmed—not by her presence, but by everything I wanted to ask. Question after question bubbled up about her exhibitions, her choices, her sense of timing, her tone. But none of them made it out. Instead, I said the only thing I could muster—that I thought it was brilliant. Different. Like nothing else I had seen, or felt, or even dreamed. She smiled, quietly, as if she had heard that kind of thing before, but it didn’t matter. The encounter, brief as it was, felt like a confirmation. A mirror held up to a desire I didn’t yet know how to name.

Over the years, we became close, encountering each other at the openings of her exhibitions, and later having long, searching conversations, not only on questions of art, but on the scaffolding that supports and constrains it. Our discussions moved fluidly between the formal logic of exhibitions, the affective undercurrents animating her work, and its uneasy positioning within the wider cultural field. Time and again, we circled back to a persistent and unresolved tension: the difficulty of attaining artistic recognition for someone whose formative roles—as a dealer, collector, and curator—had long defined her public identity. Hendeles is clear about the shift: “The stories I now tell with objects can only be called artworks. If they are artworks, then I must be an artist.”

Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002 (detail). Two mohair teddy bears, Margarete Steiff GmbH, Giengen, Germany, ca. 1908, each 50.8 cm in height; vintage family-album photographs, ca. 1908, of the bears with original owners, John E. Cook and Lawrence P. Bentick Cook of Ottawa, Canada, and related ephemera in a mahogany and glass display case. Exhibition: sameDIFFERENCE, 2002–3, Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

Her piece The Teddy Bear Project (2002) comprises thousands of found photographs of teddy bears, mostly including people posing with their cuddly companions. At first, it felt sweet. Then, disturbing. The repetition turned comfort into surveillance. The bear stopped being a toy and became instead a witness. The photographs are arranged into over a hundred typologies and displayed alongside antique teddy bears in vitrines, forming what Hendeles once called “122 chapters of a children’s book.” Her typologies aren’t just arrangements. They’re rhythm, incantation, and structural constraint. They shape narrative not by telling a story, but by repeating its shadow.

Hendeles doesn’t collect to archive. She collects to evoke. As she puts it, “The archive is not the source of my work, but rather the inadvertent result of it.” The trace, not the object, is the thing. A prosthetic leg, a worn photograph, a child’s chair: none rare, but all radioactive with use, with memory. With what’s been withheld. Many of the works she uses are drawn from her own extensive collection, which she began building long before she publicly claimed the role of artist. Her installations often juxtapose found objects with fine art and decorative elements—jewelry with memorabilia, toys with avant-garde photography.

Maurizio Cattelan, Him, 2001. Wax, human hair, suit, polyester resin and pigment, 60 x 38.1 x 58.4 cm. Background: Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002. Exhibition: Partners, 2003–4, Haus der Kunst, Munich. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

In her 2003–4 exhibition Partners at Haus der Kunst in Munich, for instance, she placed Maurizio Cattelan’s unsettling 2001 sculpture Him right after the seemingly sentimental frame of teddy bear imagery, forcing viewers into a confrontation with innocence and evil, comfort and complicity. I approached Him from the back, not knowing what to expect. The figure was small—child-sized, almost fragile. And then I saw the face. It was Hitler, rendered as a schoolboy, posed as if asking for forgiveness for something he might have thought was just a prank. The effect was disarming, deeply confusing. That scale, that posture—it didn’t absolve. It implicated. These pairings are not arbitrary, of course. They are deliberate provocations, emotional machines calibrated to disturb, to question, to slow the viewer down until surface charm gives way to ethical vertigo.

Often overlooked is another layer of Hendeles’s practice: her writing. For nearly every object she exhibits, she composes a brief note—detailed, precise, sometimes poetic. “I write small scholarly histories of each object,” she says, “so thoughtful viewers have all they might need.” These Notes are not explanations. They are invitations. They offer context, but never closure. Like everything in her exhibitions, they are characterized by restraint.

One of the quiet complications of engaging with Hendeles’s work is the matter of names. Titles recur. They shift, double back, reappear—sometimes as artworks, sometimes as exhibitions, sometimes as books. This is not confusion, nor coincidence. It’s a method. A rhythm. Her titles behave like motifs in a piece of music: themes introduced, developed, transposed, and reprised. What we encounter is not a series of discrete exhibitions but a living organism—expanding, folding into itself, shedding one skin to reveal another. Her projects do not end; they continue. They echo. They accrue meaning in time.

Ydessa Hendeles, From her wooden sleep…, 2013. Large-scale tableau vivant of antique artist’s mannequins, furniture, and collectibles; display vitrines; unique photograph by Morton Bartlett (American, 1909–1992); piano-roll music recording of “Golliwogg’s Cakewalk,” composed and performed by Claude Debussy (French, 1862–1918); installation dimensions variable. Exhibition: The Milliner’s Daughter, 2017, The Power Plant, Toronto. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

The Milliner’s Daughter and Partners illuminate this recursive structure (but nearly all of Hendeles’s work behaves in this way). The Milliner’s Daughter began as an artwork in 2016: Marburg! The Early Bird! (The Milliner’s Daughter), the latest addition to a larger installation developed over eight years, 2008 to 2016. At its center sits a nineteenth-century oil painting—Puss in Boots (ca. 1870) by Gustave Doré—framed not only by wood and glass but by Hendeles’s encompassing logic of storytelling through objects. The title then reappeared as the name of the aforementioned solo exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto in 2017. Later still, it surfaced as the name of a book released in conjunction with Grand Hotel, the 2024 exhibition in Venice. A primer for new viewers, the book looks back even as the exhibition steps forward.

Partners was the title of Hendeles’s 2003–4 exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich, where she served as guest curator. The show was staged in three “passages,” a term that already suggests movement and transformation. Hendeles redesigned the architecture of the museum itself, stripping it back to its historical bones. Within that charged space, she brought together works by Diane Arbus, Maurizio Cattelan, Giulio Paolini, Hanne Darboven, Luciano Fabro, Lawrence Weiner, On Kawara, James Coleman, Bruce Nauman, Jeff Wall, Walker Evans, Paul McCarthy, and others, alongside photojournalism and two works of her own: Ships (The Zeppelin Project), from 2002, and Partners (The Teddy Bear Project).

That latter work—Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)—began as The Teddy Bear Project, first shown in 2002 at the foundation in Toronto as part of the exhibition sameDIFFERENCE. It was later expanded for Partners in Munich. Since then, the work has traveled widely: to the National Gallery of Canada (Noah’s Ark [2004]), the Gwangju Biennale (10,000 Lives [2010]), and the New Museum in New York (The Keeper [2016]). None of this is redundancy. It is, instead, a curatorial and artistic language of return. Hendeles does not simply present exhibitions—she composes them, layers them, builds upon them. Her work is historiographic, architectural, emotional. It is as concerned with the act of remembering as it is with the things remembered. Each title is a hinge. Each iteration, a reframing. The result is a body of work not fixed in time but suspended within it, returning always—yet never the same.

Hendeles assembles like a novelist of space. But “assemble” hardly does it justice. She has described herself less as an archivist and more as a choreographer of things—a phrase that captures how her exhibitions move between narrative implication and spatial composition. She positions and lights objects not to explain them, but to activate them. The gallery is not a neutral zone she fills, but a medium she authors. The result is not a group show or thematic display—it is a singular voice speaking through many things. The distinction matters. A curator clarifies; Hendeles clouds. A curator connects dots; Hendeles draws shadows around them. Her exhibitions are total works of art—Gesamtkunstwerke—driven by an inner logic, emotional rigor, and a poetic method that belongs to art, not mediation.

This may be an audacious comparison, but Hendeles’s approach to the Gesamtkunstwerk stands in stark contrast to Richard Wagner’s. Wagner used the total work of art to construct national mythology, cultural dominance, and operatic grandeur—an aesthetic ambition that later became entangled with the ideological machinery of the Third Reich. His work, directly embraced by Hitler, helped stage a vision of cultural supremacy that shaped the very conditions of Hendeles’s family’s persecution and displacement. Against that legacy, Hendeles creates a quieter, more intimate form of totality—one shaped by fragility, fragmentation, and the trace. Wagner sought coherence, spectacle, and the sublime. Hendeles offers silence, interruption, and emotional residue. Her Gesamtkunstwerk is made not from unifying myth but from unresolved memory. Instead of orchestration, she offers accumulation. Instead of mythic heroes, haunted objects. If Wagner builds cathedrals of meaning, Hendeles builds rooms where memory flickers and withdraws. Her medium is the exhibition, but what she creates is art. One does not simply walk through her rooms; one is read by them. What are we really seeing? And what have we already forgotten?

One final exhibition merits mention—not as a conclusion, but as a moment of reckoning. Death to Pigs was the title of both an artwork and a large-scale survey held at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in 2018. It marked a kind of stocktaking, gathering as it did more than a decade of her work into something dense and multilayered. The exhibition’s title echoed the infamous phrase scrawled in blood at the site of the 1969 Manson family murders. In Hendeles’s hands, the phrase became a prism through which to examine stigmatization, violence, and the mechanisms by which societies construct the “other.”

Ydessa Hendeles, Marburg! The Early Bird!, 2008–16. Exhibition: Death to Pigs, 2018, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. Photo: Robert Keziere, courtesy the artist, © Ydessa Hendeles

At the center of the exhibition stood the artwork Death to Pigs (2015–16), a complex installation that had, like so many others, evolved. First presented in 2016 at Barbara Edwards Contemporary in Toronto, the work originally consisted of eight “scenes,” among them a naive nineteenth-century painting of a farmer with his prized pig; an anatomical teaching model of a sow resting on an oak table; a polished cast-bronze sculpture of a sleeping pig; a series of photographs, including a Homecoming Princess portrait of Leslie Van Houten, later associated with Charles Manson; and a framed first edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). The work also included Hendeles’s first video work, Three Little Pigs (2015). When the work was later shown in Vienna, a ninth element was added: nine photographs depicting a butcher’s shop diorama. For Hendeles, the pig is a symbol that shifts fluidly across cultures and centuries, oscillating between fable and insult, the sacred and the profane.

Ydessa Hendeles, From her wooden sleep…, 2013 (detail). Artist’s articulated life-size mannequin, French, ca. 1880, hand-carved pine, with wooden ball joints and dowels and fully jointed and articulated fingers, 162.6 cm in height; head from a Santos figure, Italian, ca. 1840, hand-carved and painted pine, 29 x 20 x 18.5 cm. Photograph: Robert Keziere, courtesy Ydessa Hendeles, © Ydessa Hendeles

The exhibition also featured From her wooden sleep… (2013), a haunting theatrical tableau of more than 150 vintage wooden mannequins arranged as if attending a ritual. Their collective stillness evoked the eerie symmetry of a society policing itself—silent witnesses, or silent judges. As Hendeles herself put it, “Viewers are both looking and being looked at.”

Ydessa Hendeles, Death to Pigs, 2015–16 (detail). Prize, 2015: naive-school painting of farmer with prize pig, English, ca. 1860, oil on canvas, 65 x 89 x 4 cm; anatomical teaching model of a domestic sow, German, ca. 1930, painted plaster, 44 x 84 x 29 cm; child’s table, Gustav Stickley (American, 1858–1942), ca. 1904, oak, 56 x 91 x 61 cm. Photo: Jorit Aust, courtesy the artist, © Ydessa Hendeles

To walk through Death to Pigs was not to observe, but to enter: into a world composed of echoes, refusals, and forgotten scenes. Again, the work does not resolve—it refracts. It draws on the language of folklore, childhood, trauma, and biography to expose how social boundaries are drawn and redrawn across history.

Hendeles builds counter-archives—poetic, haunted, unresolved. She arranges things not to clarify, but to trouble. She doesn’t offer memory, but stages its afterimage. Her work teaches you to sit with uncertainty, to read silence as structure. I’ve come to think of her exhibitions the way one might think of a place in a recurring dream—recognizable, but always slightly changed. She has more in common with writers like W. G. Sebald or Marguerite Duras than with most visual artists. Like Sebald, she allows history to bleed through the banal and the overlooked, using objects as vessels for grief and continuity. Like Duras, she is concerned with what resists narration—with silence, repetition, elliptical returns. Even her sense of structure recalls filmmakers like Chantal Akerman or Chris Marker: elliptical, recursive, concerned more with mood than with message. To walk through her exhibitions is to be drawn into a syntax of absence—a poetics of what cannot be said directly but insists on being felt. These are not shows to be visited; they are narratives to be inhabited, slowly, like a fog settling in.

When I try to tell people what her work is, I lose my words. I end up saying: It was a room. And it breathed. I didn’t want to leave. But when I did, something followed me out. A silence I haven’t been able to name.

Jens Hoffmann is still a stranger everywhere.

Cover image: Ydessa Hendeles, Grand Hotel, 2022 (detail). Foreground: architectural model, Italian, 19th century, wood, pressed paper, glass, iron, electric lights, 148 x 148 x 108 cm. Photo: Ydessa Hendeles Studio, courtesy the artist, © Ydessa Hendeles