Скачать или смотреть Summit Zer0 [ A talk with Kendell Geers ]

Born in Germiston (South Africa) and 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.

Describing himself as an AniMystikAktivist, Kendell Geers’ work embodies a syncretic approach that weaves together diverse Afro-European traditions from Animism and Activism, to Alchemy, Mysticism, and Ritual Magick. His strategies are without compromise because he believes that “Art changes the world – one perception at a time.” Geers has shown his work worldwide. Recent exhibitions at La Cité International des Arts, Paris, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Lambert Collection (Avignon), MAXXI Museum. He is currently showing his work at Planet B: Climate Change and the New Sublime, Palazzo Bollani in Venice. Recent solo shows at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Paris (2022), Capital C, Amsterdam (2021), Institut Supérieur Des Beaux Arts, Besançon, M77 Gallery, Milan (2020).

Summit Zer0
Meta-Tool: Resistance and Tacticality

“From its beginning, the artwork is handled in a way that enables it to survive culture. While one often speaks about artwork as a commodity, it is not a normal commodity. The normal commodity is made to be consumed—in other words, to be destroyed (eaten as bread, used as a car). So, in a certain sense, art is an anti-commodity. It is put under the condition of conservation—prevented from being destroyed by time and by use. And this, actually, is the essential characteristic of art: it survives its original culture, taking a long journey through all the other, later cultures. It remains at the same time foreign to these other cultures—an alien in their midst, carrying with it the knowledge of its past.”

The Museum as a Cradle of Revolution, Boris Groys

The word “Meta-tool” derives from Groy’s definition of art objects as something essentially different than commodities. Meta-tool is an ontological status that an object retains when its condition as a commodity shifts. The shift is marked by made-to-be-consumed-commodity turn into an immortal object, in the sense that it can outlive its original culture and context.
Questioning aesthetics and asking whether or not there is an essence to an art object is not a brand-new question in the realm of arts. Following Groy’s ideas, an art object is an ontological status. Therefore, its being is not linked to the white cube or any authoritative figure in the art world. An art object is an art object regardless of the place of exhibition or the credit given by anybody except the artist herself.


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