Ydessa Hendeles’s: Grand Hotel

Ydessa Hendeles’s newest work, Grand Hotel, shares common ground with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Both mine the past to prevent its repetition.
While Atwood’s tale describes a futuristic puritan state, Hendeles’s Grand Hotel is a documentary recalling the past to prevent its recurrence. Hendeles’s history as the only child of Auschwitz survivors inevitably informs her artwork. We cannot help but observe how today’s political events follow the stages that led to the horrors presented in the artist’s Notes for this artwork. Atwood is an author while Hendeles, previously known for her curatorial work, established herself in the last few decades as an important internationally exhibited artist.
Neither originally meant their work to specify today’s political state even though the similarities force themselves upon us. Atwood describes her 1985 novel as a potential cover story for how someone might seize power in the United States. Such a situation, argues Atwood, would “need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.” (Margaret Atwood on How She Came to Write The Handmaid’s Tale. Literary Hub. Retrieved 8 June 2025.)
Hendeles, in a private email to this reviewer, addressed her own intent, writing, “My only caution is to avoid specific current politics. I avoided any mention of the conflicts anywhere in the current world, in order to have people think about human nature, and not get distracted by the specific points of outrage. My work is an allegory. Anti-Semitism is an important underpinning in this exhibition. But I cannot hope … but to talk about the past to warn about the future.”
Grand Hotel consists of an exhibition and a book of the artist’s Notes. An enormous amount of research required for her Notes spotlight a wide range of history otherwise lost in the shadows, but they are inherently bound to the pieces included in Grand Hotel. The artist asked they not be quoted separately; they should be experienced with the work.
Hendeles also addressed the important aesthetics of the work. As a reviewer, I see aesthetics as the vocabulary and grammar of the non-verbal language of art, which express what cannot be put in words. In an earlier email, the artist herself wrote:
‘When I compose a piece, I’m thinking not only of the references but also about how the colours work together. I am painting in space with volumes and with colours. I want the hues to be harmonious and for people to immerse themselves in the composition I have presented for them. I work hard for it to be lit theatrically and also cinematically – pulled from scene to scene. I hope for their minds to transcend; in the way one dreams when peering into a store window or the vitrines in luxury hotels. The tourists need not be staying there. They can come in for tea as they can in high-end hotels like the Windsor Arms in Toronto or Claridge’s in London or The Gritti Palace in Venice…. My works are not symbolic. I am trying to encourage people to take a journey in a parallel world of dreams. …I am not an activist. I am a story teller.’
Hendeles’s political statement is subtle rather than didactic, woven into a tale of history uniting royalty and riches, poverty and oppression. The exhibition is a visual art installation; an installation in shades of beige and brown, as though we were walking across the pages of an antique book.

Grand Hotel
Grand hotels were a European concept. As the noble classes dwindled, their palaces were turned into luxury hotels. In another email to this reviewer, Hendeles explained:
‘The dynamic of all my work is that it appears to be one thing, but then mutates, or is ‘revealed’ to be something else. For example, Nicholas I is presented as Prince Charming, but then, on a deeper dive, historically, he turns out to be a terrible, terrorizing, unappealing person. Everything (in Grand Hotel) is crafted to dissolve or mutate. Just when you think it is one thing, it becomes another. ( In the exhibition itself), there is the materiality in the construction of the spaces, the theatrical lighting and the composition of the pieces. Also important are the cultural references. When building a work, I think of it as three-dimensional chess on glass chessboards. Everything is deliberately complicated (complicated, as an active verb).’
For this reviewer, a work of art is layered and primarily non-verbal, a visual language accompanied by print in this case. It speaks through our feelings to tell a story that we would miss if it were only put into words. Then it would be too abstract and intellectual. It would lack the necessary feelings that make this aesthetic a work of art, just as this review barely does justice to the magnificence of the original exhibition and Hendeles’s intensive research published in the Notes.
Grand Hotel was exhibited in Venice at Spazio Berlendis, in 2024, as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. It was presented by the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, working in collaboration with project producer Barbara Edwards. The book that accompanied the show was prescient in warning us that current political events mirror those referred to in Grand Hotel. While Atwood’s book is a narrative, Hendeles’s work is a documentary, seemingly presenting interesting, fascinating, or terrifying facts in separate parts or layers.
The curatorial statement in the Notes introduces the viewer to the content of the exhibition:
Grand Hotel is set in a country emerging from the wreckage of war. The scenario envisages a family or group of close friends who are on the road like tourists. The objects in Grand Hotel, despite the opulent origins of some, are almost all re-purposed salvage – poignant relics of a bygone era positioned to limn a contemporary story about identity, loss and a yearning for a safe space ….
The main aspect of the exhibition, which forms the third part of the book seem to present a sort of Neiman Marcus holiday catalogue showing luxury items only the wealthy can buy. Hendeles wrote about this in an email:
‘The piece is constructed as if the lobby of a grand hotel. It is cinematic – moving from the deep past to a fable inside the lobby. … Grand hotels show painted portraits of the original aristocratic owners of historic buildings that were later converted into hotels. They also feature in vitrines, glamorous items for sale in neighbouring shops in and around the hotel to entice people to go to the stores. That is, they are ‘advertisements’ to tourists of jewellery and other luxury items. (My work is not literal, but those ideas are strung together in a kind of ‘follow-the-dots’ way).

The passport to this exhibition is also its starting point: a photograph of a family posing in front of their car as they set out seemingly on a tourist vacation. This is such a normal event we are jolted awake when we learn that 15 months previously, these people, which include the artist’s parents, were rescued from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In her Notes, Hendeles wrote:
‘The picture is a record of a group of young people – all of whom were bereft of family members, of parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, children and extended family– doing their best to rebuild their lives.’
Privately, in an email to this reviewer, Hendeles wrote,
‘for the exhibition, I was trying to flesh out the Romanov family in the context of the war in Gaza with an oblique reference to my own story … different than the ordeal of Gaza refugees. I was trying to present an aspirational family after the Second World War, at a time when nobody wanted to hear anything about the Holocaust.”
The entrance to the exhibition is then the family photograph which includes her parents. In her Notes, Hendeles wrote of their experience of concentration camps, where, if the guards thought you looked too weak and sickly, they would shoot you on the spot. The exhibition then takes us to a late 19th-century painting of Jewish merchants in a small village on the edge of the Russian empire. The Russian royalty, the Romanovs, who sought power by killing members of their own family, persecuted the Jews for their refusal to assimilate and accept eastern orthodox Christianity.
In the exhibition, following the painting of the Jewish merchants, there is Hendeles’s video composition titled Goose! Using found documentary footage, dating from March 1939 and shot in Munkács, Hungary, Hendeles presented a sequence of moving images, looped and paired with a recording of ‘Oyfn Pripetchik,’ a Yiddish folksong written in 1899 by Mark Warshawsky, performed by Michal Hochman. (Michal Hochman – Oyfn Pripetchik, youtube here)At the time the footage was shot, almost half of the inhabitants of Munkács were Jewish. Not long after, they were removed and sent to die in the concentration camps by the Hitler regime.
Then comes royalty and wealth with three portraits of the Russian imperial family, their jewellery including magnificent pearls. Then we move closer to the present with the Volkswagen, the car created to allow Germans, even those of modest means, to tour their country. We then encounter the prestigious touring luggage of the wealthy. Through this exhibition we ourselves tour the oppressed in their poverty and the rich, with their opulent treasures and possessions, as though drawing a link between the rich and their oppression of the poor, lines drawing linking the from exquisite jewels of the rich linked to the suffering in the death camps. The exhibition ends with a hint of rebirth.

The hardwood child 
This model of an infant recalls the familial groups of articulated wooden manikins that populated Hendeles’s 2013 artwork From her wooden sleep … . The hardwood child is approximately the size of a mature newborn and also its weight. In her Notes, Hendeles wrote tha:
‘for survivors of displacement, there is the aspiration for a better future.’
She expanded on this point in an email:
‘As for the ‘baby,’ it is not specifically me or my son or my grandson. It hearkens to the notion of continuance, which is a universal. It was a driving force for my father, who died in 1987. The birth of a child brings with it promise, but the reliance on a new generation is uncertain.’