singing eye > mendel hardeman

Mendel Hardeman audiovisual artist / composer

Biography in 250 strokes:
Mendel Hardeman is a composer, writer and video artist, who has most recently turned his attention to the theme "Water". His works are a fusion of music, video, surrealism, religion, puppet theater, design, love, poetry, dry desert bushes and ringing goat bells.

More extensively:

2007	Plans for a long-term series of works about the dry hinterlands of North-Eastern Brazil lead to two long field trips in the region around the town of Canudos. Video shootings for part I of the series, titled: the Sea of Conselheiro.
2006	Mendel's feature debut EXODUS is premiered in Amsterdam, and invited to the Cork Film Festival, Ireland. The short films Caress and Kyrie Eleison participate in more than 30 film festivals worldwide, and are broadcasted by the austrian OktoTV. "Caress" receives the prize for Best Experimental Short in the Girona Film Festival, Spain.
2005	Music film commissioned by Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst.
2004 − 2005	Works as assistant of the Czech surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer in his most recent film Šílení (Lunacy).
1997 − 2003	Studies Composition at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, specialising in Music Theater, Music Video and Electronic Music. His main teachers are Gilius van Bergeyk, Louis Andriessen, Clarence Barlow and Martijn Padding.
1995 − 1996	First year of Theology, Theologische Universiteit Kampen

Mendel Hardeman (1977) was born in the Netherlands, and grew up in the South of Brazil. Came back to Holland in 1995 in order to study Theology, but ended up graduating in Composition at the Royal Conservatory Den Haag in 2003, having as side subjects Philosophy and Biopsychology at Leiden University. In the fall of 2004 he went to Czech Republic where he spent 6 months working as director’s assistant of the surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer in his newest film Šílení (Lunacy).
Much of his work is autobiographical, transforming processes and conflicts in his inner life into confronting works, making use of different disciplines in and outside Art. His work encompasses music-theater performances, music videos, live video performances, stop-motion animation, puppet plays with live music, and poetry, and has been performed in different places in the Netherlands, as well as in Poland, Germany, Greece, Austria, Iceland, Russia and Australia. In the last years his focus has moved more and more to video and film making. In may 2006 he finished his own first feature-length movie EXODUS, a dream of imprisonment and liberation. He is currently making a series of works based on the Canudos War (1896-97) in the Northeast of Brazil. The first work of this series, "O Mar do Conselheiro" - the Sea of Conselheiro - is about the water problem in the region: drought, flooding, and dreams about the sea.
Mendel Hardeman currently lives in The Hague, NL. Besides art he makes a living as a translator and interpreter Portuguese/Dutch and Spanish/Dutch, mostly for refugees, working in the treatment of asylum requests and in psychiatric assistance for war traumas.

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