KENDELL GEERS

Kendell Geers was born in Johannesburg and was given the name Jacobus Hermanus Pieters Geers: an alternative name he would later lose in place of his own invented name. As a white, working-class, Afrikaans-speaking, Jehovah’s Witness child in apartheid South Africa, he found himself at odds with his own identity. Although the political system in place was theoretically designed to benefit him, he didn’t subscribe to it. Growing up in a racist society, he felt separated from the overriding values of white South Africa – and from his own family – as his political consciousness developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Witnessing the violent segregation of white and black citizens, as well as of white Afrikaans speakers and English speakers, Geers was marked by opposition. Leaving home aged 15, he set out on his own to forge a new identity and escape the ‘patriarchal bigotry and intolerance’ of his upbringing. He enrolled as an art student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1985, although he had never drawn so much as an apple before. Ironically, but perhaps rightly, the path to art was a political manoeuvre for Geers, even in those early days: his decision to go to university was an outright refusal of the requirement that all white South African men join the apartheid army for two years. With education or imprisonment the only other options, Geers chose university. He was actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement, as well as in the city’s rebellious underground music and art scenes. In 1988, while again demonstrating against the apartheid regime, he tried to avoid conscription into the South African Defence Force (SADF) and was given a six-year prison sentence. Rather than serve – in the army or his sentence – he escaped, going to New York and later to England. He lived in exile until Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990; Geers then returned with the hope of participating in helping to build a new South Africa. Geers left his country again at the turn of the millennium, this time settling in Belgium, where he lives today.