• born in 1944 in Budapest, Hungary
• immigrated to Canada in 1949
• B.A., Education, McGill University, Montréal, Québec (1961-65); Ontario College of Art, Experimental Department, Toronto, Ontario (1975-79); M.F.A., York University, North York, Ontario (1978-80)

click on thumbnails at left to view larger images

Born during the Nazi occupation of Budapest, the subsequent Russian occupation of Hungary prompted Yvonne Singer's family to emigrate. Her family’s immigration and exile experiences have served as important sources of creative inquiry in works such as In Memoriam: Remembering and Forgetting Fragments of History (1993) and Dem Braven Kinde (1997). In Memoriam is an installation that recounts the story of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who lived in Hungary during the Nazi occupation and helped save 100,000 Hungarian Jews. This spatial installation is composed of two adjacent rooms. The Felt Room is comprised of brown felt walls built around a steel frame which is suspended by airplane cables. An electronic sign board is programmed by the artist with excerpts of old headlines and stories about Wallenberg, interspersed with phrases such as "Sorry, I can't hear you," and "Sorry, I can't see you." The textual narrative is fragmentary, filled with absences and gaps that resonate, leaving the viewer/reader with many questions regarding the circumstances surrounding Wallenberg's disappearance and his subsequent imprisonment in Russia. These silences in the narrative reflect the artist's own struggle to recover her own past, and reveals the gaps inherent to the mnemonic/memorial process. In The Glass Room, observations about solitary confinement are etched onto glass shelves, light from above throwing the words into shadow. The words on the shelves are fragmentary and disjointed, as memory in its very essence is incomplete and fragmentary, and it is the silences, perhaps symbolic of the desire to forget, that the artist addresses, as they often speak louder than what is explicitly stated. For Singer, memory and history as experienced by everyone are the focus of the work, which is not limited to Jewish history although it takes that as its focus. "I wanted to be able to reach an audience that wasn't necessarily a Jewish audience, that wasn’t necessarily an audience who had only experienced the Holocaust, in one way or another . . . I felt that in some way I was critiquing or challenging a version of history. I was questioning the way history is represented, especially the history of that particular period" (unpublished interview with Loren Lerner, 1998). Dem Braven Kinde (1997) is a glass hanger that the artist has engraved in German, which translates as 'those brave children'. It is replica of a hanger the family had used in Hungary and was given to Singer by her mother. By using glass, a material that is both solid yet breakable, Singer reflects on the fragility of life. Moreover this reproduction of a family possession that was acquired in Hungary prior to their immigration demonstrates the way in which memory serves as an impetus for much of Singer's artistic practice. The etched words are emblematic of life’s experiences which leaves its imprints on our identities. The Veiled Room (1998) was first exhibited at the ACC Gallery in Weimar, which has a charged description of the Veiled Room's accurate history because Hitler rose to power during the Weimar Republic. Singer used a triangular room in a gallery where the author Goethe had once lived, and veiled it with sheer curtains printed with the names of famous German artists and intellectuals on one side, excerpts from writings by Freud on another. Because the nexus where public histories and personal testimonies converge is so often the site of Singer's creative explorations, she also includes in this piece a video loop of her mother and father, a home movie, connecting the personal memory and history to the political. Using the image of the veil or curtain, Singer comments on the layering of history and memory, the play between concealing and revealing that occurs as history is both uncovered and buried over time. The way in which identity is constructed is a persistent concern for Singer, manifesting itself in the artist's need to map the memories of her parents, such as the home video, exploring how these memories have been reconstituted and adopted as her own. Singer currently teaches at York University in Toronto, Ontario.

Points of Identification
McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario

Girling, Oliver. "Responses to an (un)sound world." Eye Magazine 14 (30 September 1993): n.p.

Holubizky, Ihor, and Carmela Patrias. Yvonne Singer. In Memoriam: Forgetting and Remembering Fragments of History. North York, Ontario: Koffler Gallery, 1993.

Hornstein-Rabinovitch, Shelley. "Art about Art." Parachute 54 (March 1989): 68-69.

---. "Singer, Yvonne. White Water Gallery, Thunder Bay." C Magazine 12 (1987): 75-76.

Kellman, Tila. "Yvonne Singer. Koffler Gallery. North York." Parachute 74 (Spring 1994): 36-37.

Sutherland, W. Mark. "Search for Definition III." Espace (Fall 1991): n.p.

Swartz, Sarah Silberstein, and Margie Wolfe, eds. From Memory to Transformation: Jewish Women's Voices. Toronto, Ontario: Second Story Press, 1998.

Vivenza, Francesca. Historia & Storie. Verona, Italy: Palazzo Morelli - Bugna - Bottagisio, 1994.

Yvonne Singer's Back to Back. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto Sculpture Garden, 1984.