32 Facts About Kendell Geers

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.

Kendell Geers worked with the National Union of South African Students and the End Conscription Campaign.

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

Kendell Geers then moved to New York City, where he worked as an assistant to artist Richard Prince in 1989.

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

Kendell Geers reclaimed his identity by destroying the person he was born as, in order to give birth to himself as the artist Kendell Geers.

Kendell 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.

In 1999 Kendell 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.

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

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

Kendell Geers is known best for using a variety of images, objects, colors, and materials that signal danger in an attempt to examine power structures, social injustices, and establishment values.

Kendell Geers uses words as a means to explore the power relations and coding of language the borders of semantics in communicating complex contradictory emotions and states of being.

Kendell Geers creates disarmingly simple situations, like a single matchstick in an empty museum or a broken bottle of beer, but the simple reading quickly disintegrates within a complex forest of signs.

Kendell Geers often compares his work to the scene of a crime in which the viewer must reconstruct what has happened and then try to find their own connection to that understanding.

Kendell Geers' works create a physical presence and about performing a specific effect rather than depicting it.

Kendell Geers is drawn to the taboos that govern our lives because they are beyond our abilities to control, no matter who we presume ourselves to be, rich, poor, illiterate, educated.

Kendell Geers argues that the Found Object cannot exist outside of the quarantine of a White Cube Gallery so Duchamp literally transformed the gallery into an aesthetic zone comparable to hospitals and toilets in which every form of reality is purged like the contaminant of a virus.

Kendell Geers' art is an activity located not inside the solitude of the studio but in the rough and tumble world of actions, of political, social, and cultural engagement in what he called a dialogue between art and life.

Kendell Geers weaponised art by charging conceptual aesthetics with the ethics of political structures of control that explored the moral and ethical contradictions of the apartheid.

Kendell Geers developed a visual vocabulary characterized by provocation using a refined black humour that upcycled charged materials like concrete, security fencing, danger tape, broken glass shards, police batons, handcuffs, profanity, pornography into works of art.

Kendell Geers was one of 27 artists that represented South Africa at the 1993 Venice Biennale curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, the first time since the 1968 anti-Apartheid boycotts that South African artists had been invited.

The work was exhibited in New York on an exhibition called "Simunye' " in 1996 and happened to be in the cargo hold of TWA Flight 800 that exploded as it was taking off on 17 July 1996 so Kendell Geers transformed the unique original into an edition of 12, comparing himself to two six packs of beer.

Kendell Geers curated his first group exhibition in 1990 whilst working as a journalist for the Vrye Weekblad newspaper.

Between 1993 and 1999 Kendell Geers worked as the curator and art consult for Gencor which was later bought out by BHP.

In 1995 Kendell Geers resigned from the curatorial committee of the first Johannesburg Biennale in order to make an application to curate his own exhibition.

Kendell Geers believes that Art is the result of Life and Life is the source of Art.

In 2009 whilst preparing the work "Stripped Bare" for his exhibition "A Guest Plus a Host = A Ghost" Kendell Geers was struck by the violent beauty of the lead bullets as they opened up like flowers when they hit the glass.

Kendell Geers cast one of the exploded bullets into 18kt yellow gold earrings for Elisabetta Cipriani Wearable Art and called the Social Sculpture "Within Earshot".

Kendell Geers began a list of reasons that eventually evolved into a manifesto.

In trying to come to terms with the illegitimacy of his identity as a working-class Afrikaans white man, Kendell Geers authored the Political-Erotical-Mystical Manifesto, bringing together his early political activism with a spiritual consciousness.

Kendell Geers has participated in many international exhibitions and biennials including the Johannesburg Biennale, Havana Biennale, Istanbul Biennale, Taipei Biennale Lyon Biennale Venice Biennale Dakar Biennial Shanghai Biennale Sao Paolo Biennial Carnegie International and Documenta.