BOOK:Ydessa Hendeles-From Her Wooden Sleep,Hatje Cantz

Ydessa Hendeles has been an art therapist and an art historian, as well as a successful gallery owner in Canada. In 1993, ArtNews magazine called her one of the 50 most powerful people in the art world. Between 1988 and 2012, she mounted strange, compelling exhibitions at her private foundation in Toronto, drawn from her expanding collection of artworks, artefacts and objects. One 2009 show she curated a video installation by Pipilotti Rist and a sculpture by Thomas Schütte against a large collection of antique police truncheons and a 19th-century Punch and Judy tent from an English seaside resort. It was one of the most intriguing exhibitions I’d seen in a long time. This artist’s book interprets “From her wooden sleep . . .” (2013), artist-curator Ydessa Hendeles’s multilayered meditation on difference, diversity, and group dynamics. Central to a work inspired by and subsequently mounted at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in March 2015 is a unique community of 150 wooden artists’ manikins, dating from 1520 to 1930 and in scale from palm-size to life-size. Posed around a lone figure exposed to their collective gaze, they are an arresting extension of Hendeles’s work with psychologically charged cultural artefacts. Renowned for her large-scale, site-specific curatorial compositions, Hendeles explores the “total work of art” in this assembly of artworks, artefacts, found objects, and audio. This book of images, curated by Hendeles and presented with her Notes, showcases an artist who has fashioned a distinctive space in contemporary art.-Efi Michalarou