Artist Bio
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Contact: eliasmacauleymendel@gmail.com
Instagram: @elimendel
Elias Mendel is an multidisciplinary artist and educator working across mediums of film, animation, drawing and mixed media. His practice delves into issues of identity, migration and generational trauma. Mendel works in the in-between as both the subject and actor within the archive. He is working towards developing a new creative, emotional and engaged memorial practice.
Exhibitions include exhibiting his drawings and animations at ‘The Words Create Images’ exhibition at the 5th Casablanca art Biennale (2022), his first solo exhibition 'Letters To Yesterday' at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (2023). What Comes Next Nobody Knows, ARTCO gallery; Berlin (2022); Runt of the Litter for his short film ‘A Covid Interruption,’ (2021) , and an exhibition at The Cube, Bristol, displaying his commissioned short film for Derek Jarman’s 70th Birthday ‘The Angel in the Stone,’ (2022),
Since the discovery of his family’s archive two years ago, Mendel has developed an interdisciplinary archival, art, and memory practice. He is a descendant of Holocaust survivors, with access to a vast personal archive that reflects this history. This collection traces his family life in Germany from the 18th Century through to the First World War, bourgeois life in the Weimar Republic, the Holocaust, migration and life in apartheid-era South Africa and elsewhere.
Mendel has participated in three international artist residency programmes at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, the Sylt Foundation Gallery; Sylt Island, Germany (2022), where he made a new step in his practice, animating directly onto buildings with a Nazi legacy and Davidson College in North Carolina (2021) where he held art workshops with students, encouraging them to create art based on their own family histories, as well as presenting his art process in Kristallnacht, Memorialising and Emotion, based on a body of work developed and experienced in Sachsenhausen.
In June 2022 Mendel became the recipient of the Pollock Krasner foundation grant and has been working to develop his artistic practice.
Exhibitions link