Kendell Geers has frequently used the phrase “the perversity of my birth and the birth of my perversity” to elucidate how being brought up during apartheid formed his fundamental and radical beliefs about art. At the same time, he claims the inalienable right to use these beliefs to work in any arena anywhere in the world.
In his monograph, Irrespektiv, Geers told curator Jérôme Sans, “. . . It was my experiences in the fight against apartheid that alerted me to the power of destabilization as a strategy. I am not interested in passive viewers . . . I try to create pieces in which the viewer has to accept responsibility for their presence in the work of art . . . then the process becomes an active one.”
Fuckface (Kendell Geers) (2007, page 1) is a case in point and raises questions. Is the blunt text to be read as a finger raised to the world or as an act of abasement? Under the apartheid government Geers’s state-issued photo identification card carried the word White, affirming his race. In this work his face is equally divided into black and white by a repeated typographical design of the word FUCK.
A clue to Geers’s thinking might be found in his statement, “I am a stranger in the country of my birth by virtue of being too European in my appearance and culture. But at the same time, I am unwelcome in Europe on account of my being too African.” But Geers also takes on the concept of original sin, and writes further: “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. As a white man born into a working-class Afrikans family, I was precisely that being for whom Apartheid had been invented.”
References to the violence inherent in the apartheid society proliferate in Geers’s work. Razor wire, flashing danger lights, the red and white chevron-patterned plastic tape used to cordon off an emergency area, the broken glass that litters the street after an attack—or is set in cement on the top of suburban walls to deter intruders . . . all are elements used frequently in Geers’s installations.
Kode-X (2003), commissioned by the Museum for African Art in New York, is Geers’s concept of a museum display. Geers’s objets d’art were bought from the flea market in Brussels, which as an old colonial city is awash with the debris of colonial history. The curios presented include a small human skeleton, ibeji twin figures from Nigeria, a Buddha, three globes. All are wrapped in the chevron-patterned tape, the surface details and patina hidden, their history unclear.
Increasingly Geers’s tough work and challenging intellectual positions have brought him recognition as an uncompromising practitioner and a major international artist.
Cry Wolf 1999
60 red emergency lights and cables
Dimensions variable
Photographer unknown
© Kendell Geers
Acropolis Now (The Director’s Cut) 2004
Razormesh shelves
National Museum of Contemporary
Art, Athens, Greece
Photographer unknown
© Kendell Geers
Kode-X 2003
Found objects, chevron tape, shelves
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Lydie Nesvadba
© Kendell Geers
Kode-X (detail) 2003
Found objects, chevron tape, shelves
Image courtesy of the artist
Photographer: Lydie Nesvadba
© Kendell Geers
Twilight of the Idols (Buddha) 2002
Chevron tape, found object
41 x 29 x 20 cm
Image courtesy of the artist
© Kendell Geers