Notice Board

Ydessa Hendeles: Contemplating Post-Holocaust Trauma
November 20 | Noon | University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

Wayne Baerwaldt joins us via zoom in the University Recital Hall for this presentation.

Baerwaldt's Art NOW talk explores the representation of trauma and resilience in Grand Hotel, a curatorial composition by artist Ydessa Hendeles for the 60th Venice Biennale. Grand Hotel is a site-specific investigation of inter-generational trauma using artefacts, text, audio, video and artificial lighting. The installation creates an indexical range of meanings to explore the containment and fluidity of increasingly fragile personal and societal identities. His talk details the undercurrents of trauma in Hendeles’ narrative, to recognize it but then to elicit new meaning from Hendeles’ abstract web of trauma, loss and insecurity toward abstraction.

Wayne Baerwaldt is an independent visual arts curator and producer based in western Canada. His best-known curatorial projects trace performative elements in artmaking with an emphasis on unstable, disputed identities and the language of their construction and presentation in public and private spaces. Recent curated projects include Leesa Streifler: The Performance of Being (co-curated with Jen McRorie), If I May Digress: Richard Boulet and Collaborators, Marie Lannoo: In Extremis and Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel for the 60th Venice Biennale. He was the guest editor for Issue #62 of PUBLIC,The Gender-Diverse Lens, and conducts ongoing research in social justice issues and questions of representation as a Michele Sereda Artist in Residence for Socially Engaged Practice at the University of Regina. He is a board member of the Hnatyshyn Foundation, Ottawa and a member of the Advisory Committee of participant, inc., in New York City.

Image: Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel, detail, 2024. Photo credit: Wayne Baerwaldt.