Current Review(s)
Third World Disorder
Kendell Geers at Goodman GalleryIf one can describe a show that greets the viewer with a ceiling-high screen repeatedly spelling out the word FUCK as a softer, gentler exhibition of work than expected, then 'Third World Disorder' is it. This is Kendell Geers’ first solo gallery show in Cape Town, and not only has it been a long time coming, but it reveals a side of the artist which suggests a movement away from the angry young iconoclast familiar to the South African art world in the nineties to one with a more seasoned worldview.
It is true that the black rubber police batons of earlier years are still present: arranged in hexagram and other star shapes across the back wall of the gallery and appearing at first glance as minimalist wall drawings. The subtext, and with Geers there is always is a subtext, is a good cop/bad cop message: the hexagram is the symbol of the police, and their motto is ‘to serve and protect’ but the batons, banned in other parts of the world, are used in mass demonstrations to subdue and beat the protesting populace into submission.
09 June 2010 - 17 July 2010
Listings(s)
'A Guest + A Host = A Ghost'
Kendell Geers at Steven Friedman GalleryKendell Geers is known for work that confronts the viewer head on, often startling the eye and requiring a degree of interrogation from the spectator. In this new body of work, Geers instigates a dialogue with ‘readymade’ icon and Dadaist great, Marcel Duchamp, and presents a series of glass and mirrored sculptures. Neither homage nor naïve appropriation, this new body of work demands that the viewer reassess pre-conceived notions of the ‘authentic’ – both in the art world and in wider political spheres.
27 November 2009 - 16 January 2010
'1993'
Kendell Geers at YOUNGBLACKMANFor this exhibition at YOUNGBLACKMAN, Geers recreates his 1993 work Title Withheld (Brick).
02 June 2010 - 30 June 2010
'There is always a cup of sea to sail in': The 29th Sao Paulo Biennial
David Goldblatt, Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa at Bienal de Sao PauloThe 29th Bienal de São Paulo is anchored in the notion that it is impossible to separate art from politics. Such impossibility is expressed in the fact that art is capable of blocking the sensorial coordinates through which we understand and inhabit the world by bringing into it themes and attitudes that did not previously fit in. The title chosen for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo, 'There is always a cup of sea to sail in' - a quotation borrowed from the Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima’s major work Invenção de Orfeu (1952) – epitomizes what the Bienal seeks to achieve: to assert that the utopian dimension of art is contained within itself, not without it or beyond it. It is in the 'cup of sea' – the near infinite where artists produce their work – that the power lies to move forward.
The exhibition is organised according to six issues relating to political thought and action through art. Unfolding within a poetic and integrated curatorial space, these six 'terrains' are as follows: 'The skin of the invisible'; 'Said, unsaid, forbidden'; 'I am the street'; 'Remembrance and oblivion'; 'Far away, right here'; and 'The other, the same'.
25 September 2010 - 12 December 2010
