Events/
Kendall Geers

The Society for Contemporary Art is pleased to invite you to dinner and a lecture with KENDELL GEERS Tuesday, October 26, 1999. The work of Kendell Geers was born out of the turbulent political revolution in South Africa which resulted in the replacement of apartheid with democracy. Geers is part of a new generation of artists, both black and white, whose work fuses the experiences of this traumatic period in South Africa's history with a strong awareness of, and engagement with, broader international cultural issues. While the country dreams of becoming a multi-racial rainbow, a new and beautiful phoenix rising out of the ashes of a dark history of inhumanity, Geers adopts an anarchic position, dealing with the reality of a post-apartheid society. Rather than seeing his objects, installations and multi-media pieces as artworks for aesthetic pleasure or cultural evaluation, Geers intends them to reveal the "black hole in the Rainbow-Nation." Geers, who comes from an Afrikaaner family, sees himself as a quintessential African, "so if I am not black on the outside, then I must be black inside." He describes his art as "scratching where it does not itch." In the past, this "scratching" has involved wearing a latex Nelson Mandela mask to meet the president and becoming a member of every political party registered before the 1994 elections. The artist's explosively controversial work has earned him a unique place in the realm of politically engaged art. Geers is represented by the Stephen Friedman gallery in London and has shown in numerous international exhibitions, such as the upcoming Carnegie International in Pittsburgh; the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1998; the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997; the Venice Biennale in 1995 and the Quinta Bienal de la Havana in Cuba, 1994.