September 18 - November 7, 2026 | KUBE gallery, Genk (BE)
KENDELL GEERS
The Weight Of History
The Weight Of History
This invitation to The Weight of History is itself an artistic intervention, directly referencing Marcel Broodthaers' invitation to his first solo exhibition at Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels in 1964. In that historic statement, Broodthaers ironically questioned his transition from poet to visual artist, presenting artistic creation in terms of commercial success, sincerity and the possibility of selling something. More than sixty years later, Kendell Geers revisits this provocative declaration, replacing Broodthaers' personal circumstances with references to the contemporary art market and the bankruptcy of Stephen Friedman Gallery.
By appropriating and transforming Broodthaers' words and imagery, Geers exposes the enduring contradictions between artistic intention, institutional recognition and commercial value. The invitation is therefore not simply an announcement of the exhibition, but its first artistic proposition: a reminder that the structures through which art is presented and sold are themselves part of The Weight of History.
Kendell Geers - "The weight of history" invitation
Marcel Broodthaers - Invitation to Moi aussi, je me suis demandé si je ne pouvais pas vendre quelque chose et réussir dans la vie...
Marcel Broodthaers - Moi aussi, je me suis demandé si je ne pouvais pas vendre quelque chose... (I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something...)
In The Weight of History, Kendell Geers turns the language, objects and conventions of art back upon the institutions that give them meaning and value. Bringing together sculpture, painting, installation and performance, the exhibition revisits some of the defining questions of modern and contemporary art: what makes an object an artwork, how do images and words produce meaning, and who determines the value of art?
For Geers, art history is not a fixed narrative but an ongoing field of conflict, reinterpretation and transformation. The exhibition examines what happens when artistic gestures originally intended to challenge established conventions become absorbed into the very institutions and markets they questioned. Rather than positioning himself outside these structures, Geers turns them into artistic material, inviting artists, galleries, collectors and audiences to reconsider their own participation in the production of cultural meaning.
The Gallery as a Treason Trial
The Weight of History transforms the gallery into a metaphorical courtroom, where works of art are presented as evidence in a trial of art history itself. The word exhibit carries a deliberate double meaning: an object presented for public viewing in a gallery, and evidence submitted before a court. Each work becomes both material evidence and witness, implicated in the histories, institutions and systems of value it interrogates. At the centre of this trial is the idea of treason: the possibility that images, objects and even art itself may betray the meanings and ideals they appear to represent.
Following a line of inquiry from René Magritte's The Treachery of Images through Marcel Broodthaers' critical engagement with language and representation, Geers places the artwork itself on trial. The exhibition asks not only what images reveal or conceal, but also whether art can remain faithful to its critical ambitions once absorbed into the institutions and markets that define its value.
Exhibit A: The PanAesthetik Surgeon
At the heart of the exhibition stands Exhibit A, in which Kendell Geers introduces himself as a PanAesthetik Surgeon. Part surgical storyteller, part shamanic trickster, the artist assumes the role of an investigator dissecting the accumulated layers of art history. His practice cannot be comfortably contained within categories such as Conceptual Art, Minimalism or Appropriation Art. Instead, Geers moves between and through these traditions, exposing their internal contradictions and questioning the systems that seek to define them.
The surgeon's task is not to remove history, but to open it up: to reveal the political, economic, spiritual and cultural forces concealed beneath familiar artistic forms. In this sense, Exhibit A introduces the methodology of the entire exhibition. Art history is not a closed sequence of movements and achievements, but a living field of investigation in which the artist becomes both examiner and participant.
Kendell Geers - KG MB Tirage Sig
Marcel Broodthaers - La Signature. Série 1. Tirage illimité.
At the centre of the exhibition lies a critical engagement with the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists fundamentally changed the relationship between art and its audience. Duchamp challenged the distinction between an ordinary object and an artwork, shifting attention towards the artist's decision and the context in which an object is presented. Magritte exposed the unstable relationship between images, language and reality, questioning the apparent certainty of representation. Broodthaers extended these concerns to the museum, the gallery and the mechanisms through which art acquires institutional and economic value.
Kendell Geers - La Trahison des images
Kendell Geers - La Trahison
This conversation reaches further into the history of conceptual art. Lawrence Weiner transformed language into artistic material, while On Kawara made the passage of time and the fact of individual existence central to his practice. Gordon Matta-Clark's architectural interventions exposed the physical and social structures through which space is organised.
Kendell Geers - O.K. (EmptyV)
On Kawara - I am Still Alive
On Kawara - I am Still Alive
On Kawara - I am Still Alive
Kendell Geers - [L]Earn to [D]Read Art
Kendell Geers - “No Objects (White Out)”
Lawrence Weiner - LEARN TO READ ART
Lawrence Weiner - Many Colored Objects Placed Side by Side to Form a Row of Many Colored Objects
Geers approaches these histories not as references to be admired from a distance, but as propositions that remain open to questioning. Their relevance lies precisely in the tension between their original radicalism and their subsequent incorporation into the established history of art.
For Kendell Geers, The Weight of History is conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk: an artistic whole in which the artist, the exhibition, its architecture, performances, invitations, statements and commercial structures form part of the work itself. Following the expanded artistic practices of Marcel Duchamp, Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys, Geers challenges the separation between the artwork and the conditions through which it is produced, presented and understood.
Kendell Geers - Manifesto
His manifesto describes an approach that is PoliticalEroticalMystical, bringing together political resistance, embodied experience and spiritual inquiry. As an AniMystikAKtivist, Geers refuses to separate artistic practice from the wider contradictions of contemporary life. This expanded understanding of art also questions the reduction of artistic value to market price. A number of works were completed during the K-Hole performance and the exhibition changed again in the G-Spot (G-esamtekunstwerk Spot). The definition and understanding of art does not accept the narrow definitions of the market which favours a commodity fetishism in which the price of the object suffocates the value of art. For this reason the pricing follows an auction house system of high and low estimates with which the collector can Pray Play Prey PAY.
Kendell Geers - PrayPlay V1
The brick offers one particularly revealing point of entry into Geers' engagement with art history. In Non-ument [18KG Frag] IX (2026), an ordinary building material becomes the site of overlapping artistic, historical and linguistic associations. The work enters into dialogue with the minimalist sculpture of Carl Andre, whose use of industrial bricks challenged traditional ideas of sculptural form, authorship and artistic value, and with Marcel Broodthaers' transformation of everyday objects into vehicles for questioning artistic and institutional authority. Geers further extends this dialogue through the use of his initials, K.G., echoing Marcel Broodthaers' use of M.B. and turning the artist's own signature into another element of art-historical reference and appropriation.
Geers complicates these histories through the title itself. Non-ument unsettles the idea of the monument as a permanent bearer of collective memory, while frag introduces associations with fragmentation, violence and contemporary gaming culture. The contradiction is fundamental. A material associated with construction and permanence becomes a means of questioning the stability of history and the meanings attached to it. Rather than commemorating an established narrative, these works propose a form of remembrance in which history remains fragmented, contested and open to reinterpretation.
The exhibition unfolds as a deliberately unsettled landscape of images, objects and linguistic interventions. Monumental walls assembled from posters, archival references, fragments of text and images drawn from Geers' artistic vocabulary confront sculptural arrangements of industrial bricks placed on black plinths. The juxtaposition is pointed: materials associated with construction, weight and physical resistance are elevated into the conventions of artistic display, only to question the authority such conventions confer. Elsewhere, shattered glass lies across the gallery floor, interrupting the apparent neutrality of the exhibition space. Its fractured surface introduces a physical sense of rupture into an environment otherwise governed by the controlled presentation of artworks.
Across the surrounding walls, paintings and textual interventions destabilise the relationship between seeing, reading and understanding. Rather than functioning as a collection of independent statements, these elements establish a dialogue between the material and the symbolic, the historical and the immediate. The exhibition itself becomes part of the artistic proposition. Its meaning emerges not only from individual objects but from their relationships with one another, the architecture of the gallery and the position of the viewer.
Kendell Geers - Non-ument [18KG Frag] IX
Language has long occupied a central position in Geers' practice. Words are never merely descriptive: they can establish authority, conceal contradictions, provoke misunderstandings or transform the meaning of what we see. Following the conceptual legacy of Magritte, Broodthaers and Weiner, Geers uses linguistic shifts and unexpected associations to reveal how meaning depends upon context.
In works incorporating phrases such as ALL EYES / ALLIES / ALL LIES and REFUSE / RE-FUSE, small changes in spelling and pronunciation produce competing interpretations. Seeing becomes entangled with allegiance and deception, while rejection and transformation coexist within the same expression. These linguistic interventions are not simply exercises in wordplay. They expose the political and conceptual possibilities contained within language itself, revealing how representation can both produce and destabilise authority.
This investigation extends to paintings informed by the visual language of censorship and redacted documents. Geometric forms that initially recall the compositions of Mondrian or Malevich acquire a different significance when understood in relation to information that has been concealed. Geometric forms associated with modernist abstraction acquire a different significance when understood in relation to censorship and concealed information. What initially appears to be an autonomous composition becomes a question about who controls what can be seen, said and understood. What appears to be an autonomous composition becomes a question about who controls what can be seen, said and understood.
Kendell Geers - Pictorial Masses in Movement (EFTA00029621)
Geers' engagement with Marcel Broodthaers is particularly significant within The Weight of History. Broodthaers transformed the structures surrounding art into subjects of artistic investigation. His fictional museum, institutional announcements, exhibition invitations and interventions into the conventions of display questioned the authority through which artworks are presented, interpreted and assigned value.
In Musée d'Art Moderne à vendre — Pour cause de faillite (1970–71), Broodthaers employed the language of commercial failure to expose the contradictory relationship between artistic ambition and economic exchange.
Geers returns to these questions through both the works on display and the exhibition's own forms of communication. The invitation and exhibition statement for The Weight of History enter into dialogue with Broodthaers' historical strategies, suggesting that the announcement of an exhibition can itself become part of its artistic content.
In this context, the gallery is not simply a neutral space in which art is exhibited, nor is the collector merely the final recipient of an artwork. Geers approaches the gallery and the art market as structures in which artists, institutions and collectors are themselves implicated. By drawing attention to the conventions through which art is exhibited, interpreted and exchanged, the exhibition asks whether these structures can also become sites of critical reflection and transformation. The challenge is not to reject participation, but to transform passive consumption into active engagement.
Kendell Geers - Pour Cause de Faillite
Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne à Vendre – Pour Cause de Faillite
Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne à Vendre – Pour Cause de Faillite
Marcel Broodthaers, Musée d’Art Moderne à Vendre – Pour Cause de Faillite
The monumental wall of posters is central to The Weight of History. Rather than functioning as wallpaper or decorative background, each poster constitutes an individual artistic intervention, entering into dialogue with the works surrounding it. Together, they form a dense visual and conceptual archive in which historical references, altered texts, artistic signatures, political statements and fragments of Geers' own practice overlap.
The Wall: An Archive of Artistic Interventions
The wall operates as a network of connections. Each poster opens onto another work, artist, historical event or institutional context, inviting the viewer to move between different layers of meaning. The relationship between the individual poster and the collective installation is fundamental: each can be encountered as an autonomous work, while the wall as a whole forms part of the exhibition's expanded artistic structure.
Kendell Geers - Small Change
Kendell Geers - MB CHANGE KG
Marcel Broodthaers, Gedicht – Poem – Poème / Change – Exchange – Wechsel
In his Lost Objects, Kendell Geers challenges the legacy of Marcel Duchamp's readymade, transforming the concept of the Found Object into something charged with history, identity and political meaning. Where Duchamp elevated everyday objects into art by removing them from their original context, Geers reverses the process. His Lost Objects insist that objects cannot be separated from the histories they carry. Their materials, origins and associations become inseparable from their artistic significance.
This approach is particularly evident in Rack VI (2009), in which broken Heineken beer bottles are arranged on a replica of Duchamp's iconic Bottle Rack (1914). The Dutch beer brand refers to Geers' seventeenth-century ancestry in the Netherlands, while the shattered glass evokes the violence of colonial history and the fragmentation of personal identity. The work transforms a celebrated symbol of the avant-garde into a confrontation with the historical relationship between Europe and Africa. The AlphaBête poster extends this investigation through a visual vocabulary of broken green Heineken beer bottles. Its title and structure also invite a dialogue with Marcel Broodthaers' engagement with language, classification and representation, particularly his work Les Animaux de la ferme, in which familiar systems of naming and categorisation become instruments of artistic and institutional critique.
The broken beer bottle is a recurring element in Geers' artistic vocabulary. Associated with the violence of street confrontations and football ultras, it becomes both a potential weapon and a form of self-portraiture. In his original Self Portrait, Geers uses a broken Heineken bottle as a reference to his Dutch ancestry, confronting the relationship between personal identity, colonial history and violence. The more recent Lost Object, titled Probably the Best Self Portrait in the World, replaces Heineken with Carlsberg, appropriating the beer brand's famous advertising slogan. Through this shift, Geers introduces another layer of irony, questioning the construction of artistic identity through branding, consumer culture and commercial language.
The relationship between the broken bottles and the imagery of football ultras further complicates their meaning. What might initially appear to be an ordinary discarded object becomes a symbol of aggression, collective identity and confrontation. The bottle simultaneously carries the language of commercial branding and the potential for violence, revealing the uneasy relationship between consumer culture, belonging and political resistance. Through these transformations, Geers turns the ordinary beer bottle into a complex artistic sign, bringing together consumer culture, national identity, colonial history, violence and the artist's own position within these histories. For Geers, an object is never simply found. It carries the weight of what has been lost, forgotten or deliberately erased.
Kendell Geers - ALPHABÉTE
Kendell Geers - “Probably the Best Self Portrait in the World”
Marcel Broodthaers - Les Animaux de la ferme
Kendell Geers - Rack VI
Kendell Geers - La Trahison des images
The opening performance K-Hole, bringing together Kendell Geers, Patrick Codenys (Front 242) and Elitsa Mateva, extends The Weight of History beyond the physical artwork into sound, language and collective experience. At its core is Geers' investigation of Redactive Formalism, in which the visual language of censorship and redacted documents becomes both an artistic form and a political question.
Kendell Geers - K-HOLE
The performance draws a provocative parallel between WikiLeaks and the Epstein files, confronting the tensions between disclosure and concealment, transparency and power. These concerns also resonate throughout the exhibition's rear wall, where the aesthetics of redaction become part of the visual language of the installation.
Language plays an equally central role. Geers' PoliticalEroticalMystical Manifesto provides the lyrics for one of the musical tracks, transforming his artistic philosophy into a sonic and performative statement. The final composition revolves around four-letter words and draws upon Love by Any Means Necessary, a poem written by Geers during the COVID-19 lockdown for an online poetry programme organised by Fondation Thalie and Spirit Now.
Rather than functioning as a separate event, K-Hole forms an integral part of the exhibition's evolving Gesamtkunstwerk. Several artworks were completed during the performance, blurring the boundaries between artistic production, exhibition and live experience.
Kendell Geers' return to Genk in 2026 carries a particular historical resonance. In 2012, Geers participated in Manifesta 9: The Deep of the Modern, the ninth edition of Europe's nomadic biennial of contemporary art, held at the former Waterschei coal mine in Genk. Curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, Manifesta 9 explored the relationship between industrial history, artistic production and the profound social transformations associated with capitalism and modernisation. The former mining complex became a setting in which contemporary art, historical works and the region's industrial heritage entered into dialogue. For this context, Geers presented Monument (Fired Up) (2012), a bronze sculpture cast from discarded car tyres and crowned by a burning flame.
The work brought together apparently contradictory associations. The burning tyre evoked political resistance and workers' protests, while the eternal flame recalled the language of public commemoration. By casting discarded industrial materials in bronze, Geers transformed objects associated with consumption, waste and environmental damage into a monument. Fired Up paid tribute to the workers of the Limburg coal mines and Genk's automotive industry, while confronting the ecological consequences of industrial production and fossil-fuel dependency.
Fourteen years later, The Weight of History marks Geers' return to the same city, but with a different institutional focus. Where Fired Up addressed the contradictions of industrial capitalism and collective memory, The Weight of History turns towards the histories, institutions and economic structures through which art itself acquires meaning and value. Across both exhibitions, the monument becomes less a celebration of established history than an invitation to question the forces that produce it. Genk thus provides more than a geographical connection between two projects. It becomes a place from which to reconsider how history is constructed, remembered and continually rewritten.
Born in South Africa and shaped by the political realities of apartheid, Geers has developed an artistic practice in which questions of power, identity, violence and representation remain inseparable from the history of art itself. His engagement with European modernism and conceptual art is informed by an awareness that art history has never been culturally or politically neutral. Its narratives reflect particular systems of recognition, exclusion and authority.
In The Weight of History, these questions are brought into direct dialogue with the contemporary art world and its changing institutional and commercial structures. The exhibition does not offer a nostalgic return to an earlier moment of artistic radicalism, nor does it position the artist outside the system he examines. Instead, Geers uses the contradictions of art history as a productive field of inquiry, insisting that the critical potential of art depends upon its capacity to question its own foundations.
At stake is a question that extends beyond the exhibition: what happens when the radical ideas that once transformed art become the conventions through which art is now understood and valued? The Weight of History does not seek to resolve this contradiction. Instead, it invites artists, galleries, collectors and audiences to become active participants in questioning and reshaping the structures they have inherited. History, in Geers' hands, is neither a fixed authority nor a burden to be discarded. It remains a contested field of ideas, open to reinterpretation, resistance and transformation.
