In a distinguished career as gallerist, collector and curator before she started to make her own works, Ydessa Hendeles has fashioned a distinctive space in the contemporary art world. Internationally renowned as a pioneering exponent of curating as a creative artistic practice, her groundbreaking work is widely discussed and embraced as a model by leading members of the new generation of curators emerging today. In her exhibition making and artistic practice, Hendeles often explores notions of difference and diversity, and especially the way representation and distortion, appropriation and assimilation can filter group and individual identities.

Hendeles began to incorporate her own artistic projects into exhibitions she curated at the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation (YHAF) in Toronto in the early 1990s and later in her shows outside Canada. In 2003, she guest-curated Partners for Munich’s Haus der Kunst, a 16-gallery exhibition that included her own Partners (The Teddy Bear Project). This was first shown in a group show at YHAF in 2002, then remounted in Noah’s Ark by the National Gallery of Canada (2004) and 10,000 Lives, the 2010 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea. It will be seen again at New York’s New Museum in July 2016 in The Keeper, a group show curated by Massimiliano Gioni.

Other Hendeles artworks include: The Denslow’s Mother Goose Project, 2005, exhibited in Predators & Prey (YHAF, 2006); Survivors (The Punch and Judy Project), 2006, exhibited in Dead! Dead! Dead! (YHAF, 2007); and Church and State (The Puss in Boots Project), 2008, exhibited in Marburg! The Early Bird! at the Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg, Germany (2010). After creating The Wedding (The Walker Evans Polaroid Project) with Roni Horn for Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, in 2011, Hendeles marked her full transition from exhibition-maker as curator to exhibition-maker as artist with her first solo show, THE BIRD THAT MADE THE BREEZE TO BLOW at Galerie Johann König, Berlin (2012). This featured a group of nine integrated but autonomous works, including photographs, found-text pieces and Aero-Car N˚500, 2011, a custom-fabricated automaton sculpture performing in a monumental mahogany display vitrine.

Her first solo show for a public museum, From her wooden sleep…, curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, was mounted at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, England, in 2015. She then developed this tightly choreographed tableau vivant with significant additions specifically for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art’s Helena Rubinstein Pavilion for Contemporary Art (curated by Suzanne Landau). Ydessa Hendeles: From her wooden sleep…, a catalogue documenting the original 2013 staging of the work in the artist’s Toronto studio and at ICA, was published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, in 2016.

Inducted into the Order of Canada and the Order of Ontario, Hendeles has been honored with a Governor General’s Award for “Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts.” She has received honorary doctorates from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto, and named an Honorary Fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design, now OCAD University. Her exhibitions have been recognized repeatedly with awards granted by the Ontario Association of Art Galleries, which also presented Hendeles with an “Award for Outstanding Achievement.” She received an “Award of Distinction” from the Toronto International Art Fair and the Department of Fine Art, Concordia University, Montreal, and a “Founders Achievement Award” from the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts. In 2003, The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, named Hendeles as “Artist of the Year.”

A graduate of the University of Toronto, the New School of Art and the Toronto Art Therapy Institute, she earned a doctorate cum laude from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Fine Art at the University of Toronto.