Kendell Geers - Life

Life

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

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.

Read more about this topic:  Kendell Geers

Famous quotes containing the word life:

    The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Moons and years pass by and are gone forever, but a beautiful moment shimmers through life a ray of light.
    Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)