Strange rememoration: The cryptic logic of Ydessa Hendeles’s Grand Hotel

A lecture by internationally renowned scholar Tom McDonough—followed by a response by Joseph R. Wolin and musical performance by Richard Yaffe and Marilyn Lerner

Date and Location:
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
5pm–8pm
Canadian Music Centre, Chalmers Performance Space
20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, ON

Event Itinerary:
5pm: Reception
6–7pm: Lecture by Tom McDonough
7:15pm: Musical Performance by Richard Yaffe and Marilyn Lerner

Seating is limited. Please click here to RSVP on Eventbrite.

Tom McDonough’s lecture reflects on Toronto- and New York–based artist Ydessa Hendeles’s Grand Hotel (2024), an official Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia. Presented by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the site-responsive exhibition was mounted in the prestigious Spazio Berlendis in the district of Cannaregio. In Grand Hotel, 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.

McDonough’s talk explores the rich meanings and themes encoded in Grand Hotel, its relation to the wider body of Hendeles’s work and its resonances with contemporary culture. The lecture concludes with a response by Joseph R. Wolin.

With the generous support of Rita Bressler, this program is co-presented by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Wayne Baerwaldt, Barbara Edwards and Marlene Stern.

Fun Treren, Fun Hofenung: Songs of Tears and Hope
Following the lecture, vocalist Richard Yaffe and pianist Marilyn Lerner present a 45-minute program of Yiddish songs—some written in the wartime ghettos amidst rampant Antisemitism, some of the Yiddish theatre of that era, and a few familiar Yiddish standards. Yaffe will offer introductions about the composers and lyricists as well as broad interpretations of the pieces. These poignant songs offer a chance to reflect on the contributions made by Jewish singers and song writers of the 1930s and 40s before and during the Holocaust.

—

BIOGRAPHIES

Ydessa Hendeles
A Canadian and Polish citizen born in Marburg, Germany, just after World War II, Ydessa Hendeles is the only child of Auschwitz survivors whose Jewish community in Zawiercie, Poland, was erased in the Holocaust. In 1951, the young family moved to rebuild their lives in Toronto, where Hendeles grew up and first made her mark in the contemporary art world. With a distinguished career as collector and curator, she has mounted more than 100 exhibitions since 1980 and, in the process, fashioned a distinctive space in the art world. A pioneering exponent of curating as an artistic practice, her groundbreaking work has inspired a new generation of curators.

Hendeles has since further developed her “curatorial compositions” into an innovative art practice. This is elaborated on in the publication The Milliner’s Daughter: The Art Practice of Ydessa Hendeles, with an extensive analysis by Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal, an essay by Emily Cadger, an interview of Gaëtane Verna by Markus Müller, and a foreword by Gaëtane Verna, published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne.

Grand Hotel is accompanied by Hendeles’s detailed Notes on each component of the exhibition, which are essential to the artist’s practice. 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.

Tom McDonough
Tom McDonough is an art historian, critic and professor known for his work on contemporary art and theory, particularly in relation to the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Currently serving as a professor in the Art History Department at Binghampton University, NY, his research often focuses on the intersection of art, politics, and social movements, especially in postwar Europe. McDonough has written extensively on the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists active in Europe in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Joseph R. Wolin
Joseph R. Wolin is a critic and curator of contemporary art based in New York. He teaches in the MFA Photography program at Parsons School of Design, The New School. He is the author of more than 170 art exhibition reviews for Time Out New York since 2006, and has also written for The New Yorker, Border Crossings, Canadian Art, and Modern Painters. He has curated more than 25 exhibitions since 1994, including The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust (with Wayne Baerwaldt), which traveled to six venues in four countries, and Open This End: Contemporary Art from the Collection of Blake Byrne, which is currently traveling. He is a founding board member of Participant, Inc., in New York.

Richard Yaffe
Born to parents who embraced their secular Jewish heritage, Richard Yaffe was raised amidst the rich cultural mosaic of Winnipeg’s North End. A classically trained singer and pianist and a student of the traditional art of cantorial style, he has integrated his love of music with his abiding interest in Yiddish language and culture and has been performing both Jewish stage songs and Hebrew cantorial music in concert to Winnipeg audiences for over fifty years. He is also well known in Winnipeg as a cantor and choral conductor. It is the Yiddish music of the early and middle twentieth century that resonates most deeply and profoundly with him, and in particular the songs of the European ghettos and of the Yiddish theatre in both Europe and North America. He has appeared on Winnipeg stages in concert and musical theatre performances since the early 1970s, and was a featured entertainer for several years at Winnipeg’s acclaimed Mameloshen Festival of Yiddish Entertainment and Culture. Yaffe, who has been practising business law since 1980, was honoured with a Queen’s (now King’s) Counsel designation in 2018.

Marilyn Lerner
Internationally renowned composer–pianist, Marilyn Lerner is a prolific recording artist and performer. Her work, always utterly recognizable, is a singular expression of her passion and deep commitment to a lifelong study of modern jazz, creative improvisation, and klezmer. Recording highlights include Birds Are Returning/Marilyn Lerner in Cuba (featuring Dafnis Prieto, Jane Bunnett, and Yosvany Terry), Luminance (experimental solo piano), and Romanian Fantasy (interpretations of Ashkenazi klezmer and folk tunes). Ongoing jazz/improvised projects include Ugly Beauties (with Nick Fraser and Matt Brubeck), Lerner/Filiano/Grassi, her New York–based free jazz ensemble, The Pieces Broken with guitarist Yoshi Fruchter, and Brass Knuckle Sandwich with trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud.

Lerner is active in the New York klezmer scene and teaches and performs at Yiddish New York and KlezKanada. She is also a psychoanalyst practicing in Toronto, Canada. Her interest in the human psyche informs her sensibility in composing musical settings of poetry.