Join the JHGC and Sylt Foundation for a talk by Elias Mendel about his art and creative process, and a presentation of his artworks made throughout his residency with the Sylt Foundation in May 2023.

This collection of work examines the artist’s German Jewish history through his interventions in an extensive family archive. In recent years Elias and his father Gideon Mendel have become the custodians of a vast collection of documents, letters, objects, and photographs.

In response to the uncovering of his family history, Mendel embarked on a photographic interrogation of Germany’s Holocaust memorial culture. This journey through personal family history is multifaceted and tragic. It deals with the spaces in between: the silences, the complications, and the unspoken. This is a story of one family but is a universal tale, written in different languages, in various documents, across disparate continents and fractured peoples.

This archive traces the Mendel family history in Germany – from the 18th Century through to the Franco-Prussian War, the First World War, bourgeois life in the Weimar Republic, the Holocaust – and then life in apartheid-era South Africa.

Elias Mendel is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across mediums of photography, animation, and drawing. His practice delves into identity, migration, and generational trauma, and emerges from his own personal family archive.

RSVP to dowi@jhbholocaust.co.za