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The Steeple and The People
Ydessa Hendeles on her installation
Canadian artist and curator Ydessa Hendeles was born in Marburg in 1948. As the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, who were living as 'displaced persons' in Marburg, her family history and biography are closely connected with the history of National Socialism. The family decided to emigrate to Canada in 1951.
Home, identity, and belonging are defining themes of Hendeles’s work. For our upcoming exhibition Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, she developed an installation titled The Steeple and The People, in which she weaves historical and biographical strands together to create a new, hopeful narrative. In the run-up to the opening on November 27, Hendeles spoke with us about her work, which will be on display in the church at St. Bonifaz Abbey, Karlstr. 34.
We will introduce the artist and her work as a pre-opening event for the exhibition during an artist talk at St. Bonifaz at 5 pm on November 26.
What is the idea behind your contribution to the exhibition?
The Steeple and The People is about belief systems and their adherents. Specifically, it addresses contemporary and historical appeals to populism. In its site-sensitive installation in St. Bonifaz Abbey, the work is a fantasy of a different outcome to a story of persecution from the past. My goal is to address human nature and our shared inclination to conform.
The installation’s visual narrative, which unfolds like a nursery rhyme, speaks to our vulnerability to the seductive fantasies we are fed as children and that we internalize as part of our socialization. However, when we encounter the darker side of human nature, there is a loss of innocence. My submission for this exhibition is utopian; the work “rewinds” a dark story both to address it and to erase it by proposing a path for the future. As such, it responds directly to the exhibition title, Tell me about yesterday tomorrow.
What do you want to discuss in your work?
The Steeple and The People is the latest iteration of a body of work that questions our individual relationships to larger social communities and their belief systems. My art is about what binds people together in common belief systems and what sets them apart through perceptions of difference and diversity. My exhibition, Partners, which I mounted at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2003, sought commonalities between the children of victims and those of their perpetrators to try to move forward with empathy. More recently, the exhibition, Death to Pigs, which I made for the Kunsthalle Wien in 2018, used contemporary expressions of diversity and othering to explore the idea of belonging.
Please describe your work in one short sentence.
The work is a contemporary art fable that imagines an alternative utopian narrative for a dystopian tale from the past by recasting a story of segregation and persecution into one of acceptance and hope.
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![[Translate to English:]](/fileadmin/_processed_/b/f/csm_Nacht-Samborski_200120-Tell-me-about_583_web_76a55a26a2.jpg "[Translate to English:]")
The Steeple and The People
Ydessa Hendeles on her installation
Canadian artist and curator Ydessa Hendeles was born in Marburg in 1948. As the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, who were living as 'displaced persons' in Marburg, her family history and biography are closely connected with the history of National Socialism. The family decided to emigrate to Canada in 1951.
Home, identity, and belonging are defining themes of Hendeles’s work. For our upcoming exhibition Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, she developed an installation titled The Steeple and The People, in which she weaves historical and biographical strands together to create a new, hopeful narrative. In the run-up to the opening on November 27, Hendeles spoke with us about her work, which will be on display in the church at St. Bonifaz Abbey, Karlstr. 34.
We will introduce the artist and her work as a pre-opening event for the exhibition during an artist talk at St. Bonifaz at 5 pm on November 26.
What is the idea behind your contribution to the exhibition?
The Steeple and The People is about belief systems and their adherents. Specifically, it addresses contemporary and historical appeals to populism. In its site-sensitive installation in St. Bonifaz Abbey, the work is a fantasy of a different outcome to a story of persecution from the past. My goal is to address human nature and our shared inclination to conform.
The installation’s visual narrative, which unfolds like a nursery rhyme, speaks to our vulnerability to the seductive fantasies we are fed as children and that we internalize as part of our socialization. However, when we encounter the darker side of human nature, there is a loss of innocence. My submission for this exhibition is utopian; the work “rewinds” a dark story both to address it and to erase it by proposing a path for the future. As such, it responds directly to the exhibition title, Tell me about yesterday tomorrow.
What do you want to discuss in your work?
The Steeple and The People is the latest iteration of a body of work that questions our individual relationships to larger social communities and their belief systems. My art is about what binds people together in common belief systems and what sets them apart through perceptions of difference and diversity. My exhibition, Partners, which I mounted at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2003, sought commonalities between the children of victims and those of their perpetrators to try to move forward with empathy. More recently, the exhibition, Death to Pigs, which I made for the Kunsthalle Wien in 2018, used contemporary expressions of diversity and othering to explore the idea of belonging.
Please describe your work in one short sentence.
The work is a contemporary art fable that imagines an alternative utopian narrative for a dystopian tale from the past by recasting a story of segregation and persecution into one of acceptance and hope.