Kendell Geers

Kendell Geers
Kendell Geers at Haus der Kunst, 2013.
Born	Jacobus Hermanus Pieters Geers Johannesburg, South Africa
Nationality	South African
Education	Wits, Johannesburg
Known for	Conceptual art, installation art
Notable work	Akropolis Now

Kendell Geers is a South African conceptual artist.

Kendell Geers was born in Johannesburg as Jacobus Hermanus Pieters Geers into a white working-class Afrikaans family during the time of apartheid.

Becoming aware of the political struggles in his country, he ran away from home at the age of 15 to get involved in the anti-apartheid movement. Kendell finished his schooling at the end of 1984. At the beginning of 1985, to avoid conscription, he enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg for a Fine Arts degree. In 1988, Kendell Geers was one of 143 young men who publicly refused to serve in the South African Defence Force and faced either a life in exile or six years' imprisonment in a civilian jail. In 1989 he left South Africa and lived for a brief period in exile in the United Kingdom and New York where he worked as an assistant to artist Richard Prince.

It was only after Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners' release from prison, that Geers could return from exile to Johannesburg without fear of being imprisoned. In 1990, he returned to Johannesburg where he worked as an artist, and art critic, curator and performance artist. The first work of art he created back on South African soil was "Bloody Hell", a ritual washing of his white Afrikaaner Boer body with his own fresh blood.

Rejecting everything his family and his community stood for, in 1993 he changed his name to Kendell Geers and his date of birth to May 1968 as a political act, reclaiming his identity.

He moved to Brussels in 2000.

Sometimes described as a political artist, Kendell Geers is known best for using a variety of colors and materials that signal danger such as sirens, broken glass, and barbed wire in an attempt to examine power structures, social injustices, and establishment values. Geers has worked with different media ranging from objects to large scale installation, neon works, performances and video. Geers also uses words as a means to explore the coding and reinterpretation of language and its meaning and to communicate with his audience.

His work had heavily political elements from 1988 to 2000, during which time Geers, explored the moral and ethical contradictions of the apartheid system through his practice. He developed a visual vocabulary characterized by provocation as well as humor by using found objects such as barbed wire or glass shards. By appropriating historical events and ideas, he focused on questions of relationship between individual and society. It was in this context that Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968, the start of the student and civil revolution, and joined every political party in the period before South Africa’s first democratic elections, from the extreme right-wing to the Communist party. In this way, he expressed his doubts about the fetishization of party politics.