Kendell Geers was born in Leondale, a working-class suburb on the East Rand outside Johannesburg, South Africa, into an Afrikaans family during the time of apartheid.

KOOS sang post-punk / industrial music ballads based on Afrikaans protest poetry by poets like Ryk Hattingh and Christopher van Wyk.

In 1988, he was one of 143 young men who publicly refused to serve in the South African Defense Force and faced a six-year prison sentence as a direct consequence.

The first work of art he created back on South African soil was called "Bloody Hell," a ritual washing of his white Afrikaaner Boer body with his own fresh blood.

I was born guilty, without being given the option[10]" an acknowledgment that one of the artist's ancestors (Carel Frederik Christoffel Geers[11]) was a Boer at the Battle of Blood River.

He reclaimed his identity by destroying the person he was born as (named Jacobus Hermanus Pieter), in order to give birth to himself as the artist Kendell Geers.

[19] The resulting exhibition was called "Sympathy for the Devil" and consisted of a single matchstick titled "The Terrorists Apprentice" installed in the empty museum.

[23] He refers to this as TerroRealism[24] which he defines as "artists who had grown up in countries that had been torn apart by war, revolution, conflict, crime and genocide created work according to an entirely different set of aesthetic principles.

In place of the cool detached passive showroom aesthetics of the white cube shrine, their work was invested with a Reality Principle that sought to disrupt the viewer’s pleasure more than satisfy it.

"[25] Geers is known best for using a variety of images, objects, colors and materials that signal danger in an attempt to examine power structures, social injustices, and establishment values.

Geers also uses words as a means to explore the power relations and coding of language the borders of semantics in communicating complex contradictory emotions and states of being.

[26] "The working process is defined by risk and experiment and yes sometimes I have glorious failures but sometimes what remains is something like the scene of a crime, both attractive and repulsive and the viewer is the detective that must put all the pieces together and decode my intentions.

[33] Geers compares the Modernist concept of the Found Object with the Colonial act of “DISCOVERING” a country, or a continent, that effectively erases centuries of history by disregarding the indigenous people who live there.

Strongly influenced by the ideas of Léopold Sédar Senghor Geers used his experiences as an anti-apartheid activist to interrogate the reading of Conceptual art from an Afro-Centric perspective.

[37] He developed a visual vocabulary characterized by provocation using a refined black humour that upcycled charged materials like concrete, security fencing, danger tape, broken glass shards, police batons, handcuffs, profanity, pornography into works of art.

As an amplification of this debate, Title Withheld (Boycott) returns us to the vault of the museum, to its ethnographic storage rooms and holding docks, where art and cultural objects await dispersal into the myriad networks of institutional recontextualization.

He simply places an art-book caption for Marcel Duchamp's Conceptual joke "Air of Paris" beside a news photo of police administering oxygen to a victim of a terrorist attack.

"[43] Following his year long sabbatical in 2001/2002 his work increasingly took on a spiritual dimension influenced by Alchemy, Kabbalah, Esoterism, Animism, Tarot and Tantra, whilst maintaining his commitment to Activism.

[37] Here, Geers transferred his incendiary practice into a post-colonial and increasingly global context, suggesting more universal themes like terrorism, spirituality, and mortality.

As such, the artist’s life and work can be said to constitute a living archive composed of political events, photographs, letters, and literary texts that serve as a source of inspiration and represent a continuation of his oeuvre.

Morkel, Wayne Barker, Belinda Blignaut, Joachim Schönfeldt, Mallory de Cock, Julie Wajs, Diana Victor[57] Between 1993 and 1999 Geers worked as the curator and art consult for Gencor which was later bought out by BHP.

The period was characterised by widespread violence, the proliferation of pornography, prostitution, drugs, gangs, confessions, denials, accusations, murders, abductions and assassinations.

Yet at the same time the air was filled with the spirit of renewal, euphoria and optimistic hope concerning the prospect of the first democratic election"[58] The book included essays by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Colin Richards, Elza Miles, Ashraf Jamal and others.

The artists which included Janine Antoni, Hany Armanious, Carlos Capelán, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Philippe Parreno, Paul Ramirez Jonas and Rirkrit Tiravanija were selected "by their experiences and relationships with the languages of art rather than by their ethnicity.

[62] The project was an attempt to find a hybrid space between image and music, working from video clips that were looped, remixed and composed simultaneously from both visual and audio points of view.

In 2009 whilst preparing the work "Stripped Bare" for his exhibition "A Guest Plus a Host = A Ghost" Geers was struck by the violent beauty of the lead bullets as they opened up like flowers when they hit the glass.

He cast one of the exploded bullets into 18kt yellow gold earrings for Elisabetta Cipriani Wearable Art and called the Social Sculpture "Within Earshot"[63] In 2020 Geers designed the A.S. Velasca kits for the season 2020/21.

[64] In the preparations for a retrospective that would begin at the South African National Gallery and travel to Haus der Kunst Geers fell out with the curators.

In trying to come to terms with the illegitimacy of his identity as a working-class Afrikaans white man, Geers authored the Political-Erotical-Mystical Manifesto, bringing together his early political activism with a spiritual consciousness.