Victoria Hely Hutchinson I left my Grandmother’s House

For I Left My Grandmother’s House, Victoria Hely-Hutchinson (b. 1984, British) turns not only her eye, but her ear as well to her extended family in Austria, merging fragments of family lore with keenly observed photographs. The work neither provides a tidy critique of the extant aristocracy, nor does it blithely venerate the decor, saying “ooooh,” while rolling the brocade curtains between its fingers. Instead, it simply shows and tells, through the disembodied perspective of familial subjectivity. It interrogates history but receives only demure shrugs in response. The heart of the project lies in the darkly comedic stories told over dinner by Hely-Hutchinson’s domineeringly charismatic (or is it charismatically domineering?) grandmother, an Austro-Hungarian countess, who ran away with her family’s English foreign exchange student (later known as Grandpa Hugh) at age 16, and now lives a life of ease in the French Riviera, captured with great sensitivity in Hely-Hutchinson’s documenta