Notes

‘Kendall Geers is a visual artist whose artistic practice spans a polyphony of media, including installation, sculpture, drawing, video, performance, printmaking and photography. As a conceptual artist born into the tendentious political period of apartheid in South Africa, Geers’ identity as a white Afrikaner provided a fecund environment in which he was able to explore both art and life. Geers’ incendiary artistic practice can largely be defined according to two important periods, denoted by the dates 1989 and 2000. In 1989 Geers left South Africa as a form of self-exile to move to New York, as a result of the military conscription that was forced onto white males at that time by the South Africa Defence Force. In New York he spent some time working as a studio assistant to the artist Richard Price before returning to South Africa in 1990 after the release of Nelson Mandela. The second date, 2000, denotes the year of Geers’ emigration to Brussels. These two periods embody two distinct bodies of work where the contradictions and entanglements of the postcolonial manifest themselves.’¹
1. Clive Kellner (2013) Kendall Geers, Munich: Prestel, page 11.

Exhibited

Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon, 10 August to 13 November 2016.

Literature

Josh Ginsburg and Jason Webb (2016) Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon, Johannesburg: Wits Art Museum, illustrated on page 40.