Wandering around the Oranienburger arts district in BERLIN a couple of weeks ago, I came across posters announcing an exhibition curated by Ydessa Hendeles – well known in TORONTO – and becoming more so internationally.

Following The Wedding (The Walker Evans Project), her first show in NEW YORK CITY last winter, Ms. Hendeles has now moved on to BERLIN with The Bird That Made The Breeze To Blow at Johann Konig Gallery, Dessaurstrasse 6-7, until July 7/2012.

This is her third show in Germany, following the critically acclaimed Partners (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2003) and Marburg! The Early Bird! (2010). As gallerist and exhibition-maker, she has mounted more than 100 exhibitions – many of them in her TORONTO gallery space on King Street West.

This show marks Hendeles’s identity transition from exhibition-making as a curator to exhibition-making as an artist. The Bird That Made The Breeze To Blow challenges conventional assumptions about the boundaries between artistic production, collecting, curating and exhibiting. The show provides viewers with an art installation experience, as well as a group of autonomous works, each standing on its own outside the context of the exhibition. It’s made up of photographs and text pieces in conjunction with antique clockwork key-wind tin toys and a custom-fabricated, painted-metal automaton that performs in a large mahogany vitrine.