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Elias Mendel

                                                        Words Left Unsaid 


Mendel’s ‘Words Left Unsaid’ uses sculptural Mulberry paper to draw and engage in dialogue with the surrounding landscape. This conversation uses archival research of the site, which is then troubled through the application of water, be it dipped in the lake or sat out during a thunderstorm. Afterwards, Mendel frottages over the paper surface and redraws it, following the lines of footsteps, dirt and water. This active collaboration highlights water and the natural world's influence on the urban, inviting viewers to feel their inexplicable tie.

Lyu, in her Staying With a Long Thought, conducted performative research on her obsession with a specific section of the lakeside: behind Keith Haring’s Self-Portrait.



Dancing with Martha 

Artworks created 2024-2026 during MFA at UIC 




Instructions for the Archive / Beetroot is a body of work that examines the meaning of archive and family history. This investigation examines Martha Mendel De Vries, who was my great-aunt. Martha was an expert in a specific type of German expressionist dance, called Laban.  Martha trained in Germany in the 1920s and moved to Amsterdam to found the first Laban dance school in the Netherlands. However, Martha, being Jewish, had to close her school and go into hiding after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Despite Martha surviving in hiding during the war, she died of cancer in 1950, and her work, her dancing and choreography, has largely been forgotten. Presented are two photographs of drawings responding to the instructions examining this history:

Clean it , Discover it, Understand it, Translate it (fail), Archive it, Dream it, Perform it, Kiss it (frequently), Love it, Hate it, Destroy it (fail), Mourn it, Forget it.





ChalkBoard Drawings 1-13  
Beetroot drawing 
Dancing with Martha (below) Chalk, beetroot, photograph, 2026. 









Instructions for the Archive/ Beetroot, text and drawn response, 2026



Instructions for the Archive asks a series of questions about the nature of the archive in the present. Who is it for? Why do we remember? Why is there an urgency to forget? The body is increasingly brought into question as the site of contention within historical memory. Mendel responds to thirteen instructions for the Archive / Beetroot to dance, draw, and mourn within a ritual space of longing and forgetting.










Dear Martha, 2025, Performance Excerpt.


Follow the link to see the video of the performance: 

https://youtu.be/M4m3dijqY0k


 Errasure beetroots 2026




Correspondence i, 2025, Ink on Paper. 



Re(Collections), 2025, Ink on Paper. 











Torn Correspondence, Book i and ii, 2025, Ink on paper. 






Sorry We Keep Missing Eachother, 2025:



"Sorry We Keep Missing Each Other" explores themes of missed connections, lost calls, and passing-throughs. The ink-stop motion animation imagines a world where the archive, the physical text of a family’s communication, comes alive. In this space, the texts appear and

repeat; they live, they die, they fall apart and become animated. As the ink piles, layer upon layer, the letters reach towards abstraction. The text featured in the short film draws from

my German Jewish family archive, with excerpts from documents from the late 1800s through to the present day.






Letters to Yesterday

Exhibition and residency at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre




In May 2022 Elias Mendel embarked on his first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide centre. The exhibition included self-portraits, diaries, charcoal drawings, charcoal stop-motion- animation, watercolour tapestries and a sulptural piece. This work all examined Mendel’s relationship and work on his personal German Jewish family history and archive.

Alongside the exhibition Mendel embarked on a series of workshops varying from school learners to poets, to talks and peformances engaging with the South Africa chapter of his family story. 













Exhibition at the Casablanca Art Beinale 2022 


Elias Mendel’s first formal exhibition took place at the Casablanca Art Beinale, ‘The Words Create Images’, which was a unique oppertunity to have his work in collaboration with many globally emerging and established artists.



Exhibition of his work in Casablanca 

The Frankfurterstrasse 99 series 





 





The archive contains hundreds of letters addressed to 99 Frankfurterstrasse where my grandfather was born in Offenbach near Frankfurt. It is a space imbued with huge significance. It is where my great grandmother mother received news of my great grandfather’s death in the First World War, and from where my great grandmother was deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942. The house was destroyed by allied bombing in 1945.  There are hundreds of letters in our archive addressed to this house.