Curated by Gaëtane Verna

In 1988, Ydessa Hendeles opened a private foundation (shuttered in 2012) to support Canadian and internationally based artists:There, she orchestrated uncanny exhibitions combining contemporary art, historical artifacts, and found objects, at times interweaving her own projects with those of the artists she championed. The Power Plant’s exhibition marks the first time the entire venue has been devoted to the work of a female artist, and ample space will be provided for a number of Hendeles’s complex works from the past decade, including From her wooden sleep . . . , 2013, and “THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW,” 2012. Hendeles was born in Germany in 1948 and immigrated to Canada with her parents, both Auschwitz survivors, in 1951—meaning that she spent her childhood in the wake of European fascism and came of age during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. It should come as little surprise, then, that the politics of power and identity underpin Hendeles’s work, which performs a kind of psychoanalysis of the past, via its images and objects, proffering a new lens through which to view the present. 

— Kathy Noble