Kendell Geers　

November 1 – 19, 2017
Curated by Juan Puntes
WhiteBox Artistic Director : Amanda Ryan, Curatorial Associate
Dancers : Rachel Berman, Justin Cabrillos, John Hoobyar, Sarah Konner, Lily Bo Shapiro, Carlo Villanueva
Supported by Goodman Gallery and the South African Pavilion Committee, Johnathan Jawno and Southern African Foundation For Contemporary Art

A man and a woman stand off in poetic battle, holding between them a double sided mirror using only their body weight and pressure to keep it from falling. If either loses their step or fails to resist, both will fall and the illusion shattered. The struggle with the image transforms with time into a battle of spirit and energy as physical exhaustion takes its toll. Neither can see the other and stars blindly at the reflected image of their own naked torso, cut at the waste with the legs of their partner in an androgynous portrait of Ritualised Resistance.

WhoDoVooDuchamp?
Sunday, November 19
Location TBA
African Artist Kendell Geers loves to hate and hates to love the father of conceptual art. In this spoken word ritual killing of the father, historical fact, mythology, fiction and fantasy are blended in a quasi-art historical spoken work performance. Everything you thought you knew about Marcel Duchamp will be changed forever as he is exposed as spy, Rosicrucian, initiate, sexual predator, secret society master general and thief. Tighten the seatbelts of your expectations as you are taken on a guided tour, racing through time in a spectacular detour of history, by a master trickster of the spoken word.

Artist Bio
Born into a working-class Afrikaans family during the height of Apartheid, Kendell Geers quickly found himself fighting a Crime Against Humanity on the front lines of activism and protest. From his strong experiences as a revolutionary, he developed a psycho-social-political practice that held ethics and aesthetics to be opposite sides of the very same coin, spinning upon the tables of history. In his hands, the discourse of art history is interrogated, languages of power and ideological codes subverted, expectations smashed and belief systems transformed into aesthetic codes

Believing that art is as political as it is spiritual, Kendell Geers’ varied practice cannot be simplified, cannot be reduced to cliché or fashion. His strategies are without compromise because he believes that “Art changes the world – one perception at a time.”