Grand Hotel

The Art Museum at the University of Toronto is proud to present Ydessa Hendeles: Grand Hotel as an official Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, working in collaboration with Project Producer Barbara Edwards, the site-responsive exhibition is mounted in the prestigious Spazio Berlendis adjacent to the Fondamente Nove in the district of Cannaregio. In Grand Hotel, Ydessa Hendeles explores the critical themes of cultural identity, displacement, intergenerational trauma and loss linking the past to the present.

Informed by the artist’s family history of persecution and migration, Grand Hotel offers a visceral experience that addresses perceptions of cultural identity and otherness. In a setting that calls to mind The Merchant of Venice and the historical Jewish Ghetto, Grand Hotel presents a timely questioning of the psychosocial dynamics that construct our world. For more than two decades, leading galleries and institutions in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East have presented Hendeles’s unique, large-scale compositions, inviting viewers to find their own resonances in historically informed creations that are at once intensely personal and broadly relevant. Grand Hotel is the newest iteration in the artist’s body of work.