Kendell Geers

Jacobus Hermanus Pieters Geers, commonly known as Kendell Geers, is a South African conceptual artist.

Geers lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

Kendell Geers was born in Leondale, a working-class suburb on the East Rand outside Johannesburg, South Africa, into an Afrikaans family during the time of apartheid.

At the age of 15, Geers ran away from home due to an abusive, alcoholic father, and joined the anti-apartheid movement.

The apartheid government had a policy of compulsory conscription for white males as young as 16 years old.

Geers applied to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in order to avoid conscription into the South African Defence Force.

While at art school, Geers met fellow artist Neil Goedhals, and they formed the Performance Art group KOOS with Marcel van Heerden, Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, and Velile Nxazonke.

KOOS sang post-punk / industrial music ballads based on Afrikaans protest poetry by poets like Ryk Hattingh and Christopher can Wyk.

Although they were included on the Voëlvry compilation album and performed at Die Eerste Afrikaanse Rockfees, KOOS performed only one concert, at the University of the Witwatersrand, as part of The Voëlvry Movement tour.

Challenging his Afrikaans family and Boer culture, he changed his date of birth to May 1968 as a political act, reclaiming his identity by destroying the person he was born as (named Jacobus Hermanus Pieter), in order to give birth to himself as the artist Kendell Geers.

The act of washing his skin in his own blood was a reference to the line "My head is bloody, but unbowed" from the poem Invictus.

Whilst incarcerated on Robben Island prison, Nelson Mandela recited this poem to other prisoners.

Geers chose May 1968 in recognition of the world’s last great utopian revolution and numerous anti-apartheid protests at the Venice Biennial, which resulted in a boycott that lasted until 1993.

The date also refers to the Situationist International movement, and the concept of Détournement in which "Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite"

Shortly after his return from exile, Albie Sachs wrote a seminal essay called “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom” in which he calling on his fellow ANC members to desist from "saying that culture is a weapon of struggle."

In response Geers wrote an article for the Star Newspaper in which Geers reversed the challenge by "saying that the struggle is a weapon of culture."

He wrote "All good art is political in the sense that it challenges the ideologies and cultural prejudices of both the viewer and the artist. Political art must be perceived less as a set of predictable subjects and more as a critique of social representations" Believing that there can be "No Poetry after Apartheid" Geers used the alienation he felt in relation to his cultural heritage to create a new practice that he called "Relational Ethics" in which he used his experiences as an activist as a weapon to challenge the minimalist aesthetics of Conceptual art.

In this period he began using police batons, razormesh, broken glass, gunshots, danger tape and punk style xeroxes in his art.

In 1988, he was one of 143 young men who publicly refused to serve in the South African Defense Force and faced a six-year prison sentence as a direct consequence.

He left South Africa and went into exile as a refugee in the United Kingdom.

Curator Clive Kellner described the 1988 - 2000 period of Geers work as political but the artist does not like this label.

Instead of declaring what he believes in he prefers to create art that embodies a moral ambiguity that invites the viewer to confront what they believe in and this way there is a dialogue and a transformation.

He refers to this as TerroRealism which he defines as "artists who had grown up in countries that had been torn apart by war, revolution, conflict, crime and genocide created work according to an entirely different set of aesthetic principles. In place of the cool detached passive showroom aesthetics of the white cube shrine, their work was invested with a Reality Principle that sought to disrupt the viewer’s pleasure more than satisfy it."

From there, he moved to New York City, where he worked as an assistant to artist Richard Prince in 1989.

KOOS disbanded in 1990 following the suicide of Neil Goedhals on 16 August, 1990.

At Wits University Geers became an activist working with National Union of South African Students and the End Conscription Campaign.

With the release of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners Geers returned to South Africa as soon as possible in 1990.

He began working as an art critic and curator whilst practicing as an artist.

The first work of art he created back on South African soil was called "Bloody Hell", a ritual washing of his white Afrikaaner Boer body with his own fresh blood.

The essay begins with the words "I am guilty! I cannot hide my guilt, as it is written all over my face. I was born guilty, without being given the option " an acknowledgment that one of the artist's ancestors (Carel Frederik Christoffel Geers ) was a Boer at the Battle of Blood River.

The blood that he washed himself with symbolized an exorcism of his ancestral, cultural and religious heritage.

In 1995 he created "Self Portrait," an iconic work that consists of no more than a broken Heineken beer bottleneck.

The label remains attached to the broken glass and reads "Imported from Holland. The Superior Quality."

In 1999 Geers took up a one year residence at Solitude Palace in Stuttgart and from there moved to Leipzig, Berlin, Vienna and finally settled in London.

Following a deep sense of disillusionment in the art system he decided to take a 12 month sabbatical in which he did not create a single work of art.

His plan was to instead read and think about art, life, politics in search of a justification to continue making art.

He was however already committed to a solo exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans so he promised that he would exhibit the conclusion of his year long research driven sabbatical at the Palais de Tokyo.

The resulting exhibition was called "Sympathy for the Devil" and consisted of a single matchstick titled "The Terrorists Apprentice" installed in the empty museum.

During the opening on the 1 June 2002, a vandal destroyed the matchstick, but it was replaced the following day

Geers moved to Brussels in 2003