MARCO

(Germiston, South Africa, 1968; lives and works in Brussels, Belgium)

Kendell Geers is an artist, performance artist, musician and film-maker. In 1993, at the Venice Biennial, Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to May 1968. He has exhibited globally since 1993 and participated in numerous exhibitions including Documenta, the Carnegie International, Havana Biennial, Kwang Ju Biennial, Taipei Biennial, Lyon Biennial as well as presented solo exhibitions in the CCA Cincinnati, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst Gent, Baltic Centre for Contemporary ARte, Aspen Art Museum and the CAC in Lyon.

Over the years, Geers has consistently explored life, contemporary history and the implications of the abuse of power, violence, oppression, control as well as the collapse of belief systems and ideologies, using all possible media. A project by Geers is an attack. It is instinctual, direct and matches the brutality encountered in contemporary society. He proposes to the viewer an interrogation and asks for a definition of positions, thus creating a decisive discomfort.

In 1988 Kendell Geers was one of 143 young men that publicly refused to enter serve in the South African Defence Force and faced either a life in exile or 6 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. In 1990, once Nelson Mandela had been released from jail and Apartheid officially dismantled, Geers returned to Johannesburg where he worked as an artist, and art critic, curator and performance artist. The first work of art created back on South African soil was ‘Bloody Hell', a ritual washing of his white Afrikaaner Boer body with the artists own fresh blood. From 1999 until 2004 he worked as the curator and art consult for Gencor which was later bought out by BHP Billiton. The collection focused on artists and works of art that were central to the Anti-Apartheid Movement spirit. In 1997 Geers edited and published Contemporary South African Art with essays by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Colin Richards, Elizabeth Rankin and Julia Charlton.