singing eye > mendel hardeman

What people wrote about Mendel Hardeman's work

Richard Ayres about Mendel Hardeman

'Mendel Hardeman possesses an extraordinary and rare imagination, and a remarkable talent for creating unusual and personal poetic imagery and sound. He manages to combine a thorough understanding of technology with an unpretentious "home-made" esthetic to produce what could only be described as "stage-art" that crosses all borders between all artistic disciplines.'

Jan Švankmajer about Caress (2005)

'Ecological Surrealism.'

VIS - Vienna Independent Shorts news about Caress (2005)

'A film that makes you aware of your own skin. Mendel hardeman's video work is guaranteed to cover you with goose pimples.'

Karl Mechem (Journal of Short Film, Columbus, Ohio)
about Kyrie Eleison (2005)

"Kyrie Eleison" was especially well made, I thought. Based on an intriguing concept, the seamlessness of the visuals went very well with the audio track.'

Volkskrant 15 november 2004, Frits van der Waa
about the Singing Eye (2004)

'... A moment of magic happens when humming voices start singing softly from between the audience. Surrounded by modulated sounds we hear a somewhat decayed music based on harmonic schemes from the baroque...'

Richard Ayres about Via Crucis (2003)

'I should mention one very strange and unusual event that I was lucky enough to witness: the final exam of Mendel Hardeman at the Royal Conservatorium in Den Haag.
Have I ever encountered such an astonishing imagination? Ummm.... maybe only in the films of Guy Maddin and the Quay Brothers. Did I really see a freshly crucified Jesus Christ playing a Bach flute tune on a singing-saw accompanied by a small reed organ..... or a cascade of tiny white crosses raining down on the audience only to remain suspended above our heads with spotlight picking them out and making them twinkle like tiny stars.....
I couldn't decide whether I should laugh or cry... in the end I spent the two and a half hours doing both. So beautiful, so moving, and at the same time so hilarious and strange. I hope he gets the chance to make more shows like this.'

Mayke Nas about Tattooed Tongues (2002)

'Tattooed Tongues is a strange multi-media mix of fantastically spiced music (Martijn Padding), ununderstandable esoteric texts (Friso Haverkamp) and almost static, etherical light projections on a huge screen. Luckily Mendel (Hardeman) brings in a few short, freaky interruptions, which somehow put the image and the music a bit more into balance. Specially the moment in which he films his own eye, fragmented through the rotations of a caleidoscopic tube, is breathtaking. Pupils melt together, eyelids vanish and reappear, eye corners shrink and now and then the eye lashes blink everything into pieces.
It's a pity the production is only performed once. "Pure waste of money" says Martijn Padding in an interview, and he's right. "We have a wonderful orchestra, a fabulous group of soloists, and then it's only done once." When the interviewer said he might as well be grateful that his work was being performed at all, and that a bit of humility would not look so bad, he reacted immediately: "Humility? ... come on ! Thankfulness doesn't belong in art. Thankfulness is something for the Salvation Army."

Volkskrant 10 april 2000, Frits van der Waa
about Reveal thyself Alighieri (2000)

'( ... ) More ambitious than that was "Reveal thyself Alighieri", a performance with video and tape by Mendel Hardeman, where Hieronimus Bosch' "Garden of Earthly Delights" decays into jigsaw pieces, and the funeral march of Beethoven's Eroica is led along wondrous synthetic paths.'

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